Il y a vingt ans, mes parents m’ont donné le nom Rachel Mihuta Grimm. C’est une bouchée de syllabes qui contient le nom de famille de mon père (Grimm), celui de ma mère (Mihuta), et le poids de la légende d’une matriarche biblique (Rachel), mère de Joseph, son fils de merveille, et de Benjamin, son fils de deuil. Je suis la fille d’un pilote avec une intelligence et un esprit aussi formidables que les cieux qu’il traverse et une biologiste devenue institutrice au collège. Mon frère ainé est ingénieur et qui, à l’âge de vingt-deux ans, est déjà un employée respecté et indispensable de Boeing, le plus grand avionneur de monde. Et moi je suis écrivaillon qui se croit écrivaine dans mes moments de fantaisie. Je suis dans ma troisième année d’études d’anglais et de français à Ohio University à Athens, Ohio, une ville appelée comme le centre intellectuel du monde ancien, mais coincée dans la pauvreté démunie des Appalaches.
Ma jeunesse était caractérisée d’un sens profond d’isolement—tout d’abord dans ma famille nucléaire et plus tard dans le contexte dans le village où j’étais élevée. Mes parents m’ont nourrie d’une alimentation de pensées et de spiritualité libérales. Pour cela je serai toujours reconnaissante, mais cette éducation m’a forcément éloignée de mes pairs. Kidron, Ohio: c’est un tout petit village où on croit toujours que le réchauffement climatique est un bobard puéril et qu’un programme de soins de santé universel est évidence d’un germe de socialisme qui infectera notre démocratie. Quels cons. Il fallait que je fuie de là, sans question. Je me suis mise à l’abri de l’ignorance et je me suis refugiée dans le monde académique et dans la littérature.
Pendant deux ans à l’université, j’étais contente de suivre le chemin dallé par mes prédécesseurs dans le domaine de la littérature. J’étais captivée par les bibliothèques silencieuses qui bordaient ma voie et je me suis perdue dans le labyrinthe des grands esprits, plein de promesses d’éclaircissement. Mais bien que mon chemin à moi était individualisé et de temps en temps isolé, je faisais partie quand même d’un édifice plus grand que ma perspective là-dessus. C’est une structure immense construite après des siècles et des siècles d’érudition. Je n’étais qu’une voyageuse qui errait parmi ses sentiers, mon chemin unique mais fixe. Et au centre de ce labyrinthe, prêt à engorger le chanceux voyageur qui y achève, était le Minotaure de Dédale lui-même. Dans le domaine de la littérature, on appelle ce monstre « le canon occidental. » C'est lui qui aura toujours le dernier mot.
Heureusement, j’ai eu la chance d’entrevois à distance ce monstre tout englobant avant qu’il me dévore complètement. Et j’ai compris enfin que les voix de mes professeurs respectés auxquels je me suis habituée à entendre et absorber n’étaient pas leurs voix à eux. Ils ont parcouru dans le même dédale que moi et c’était en fait la voix du monstre, le canon occidental, que j’ai entendue sortir de leur bouche. Ce monstre est plutôt un virus ; il réside dans leurs poumons, il se perche sur les petits os de leurs oreilles internes. Mais de cette position privilégiée, il contrôle tout, il silence tout ce qui le contredit. C’est pour ça que nos bibliothèques sont si silencieuses ; c’est pour respect et pour peur de réveiller et de contrarier ce monstre et son canon.
J’ai découvert que j’avais été si accaparée de la luminosité au centre de ce labyrinthe construite par les mains tachées d’encre de la tradition littéraire que j’avais ignoré tout ce qui est périphérique. Je voulais explorer toutes les pièces et toutes les portes qui avaient étaient verrouillées jusqu’à là. Tournant le dos pour la première fois à ce que le canon occidental et les professeurs qui le régurgitent m’ont toujours dit à étudier—Milton et Molière jusqu’à Giraudoux et Proust—j’ai jeté un coup d’œil furtif derrière ces portes fermées. Et j’y ai trouvé une foule de voix bruyantes, intrépides, hurlant dans toutes les langes du monde derrière des huis clos. Et c’est à ce moment là où j’ai découvert votre écriture à vous, Mme. Mokeddem.
En lisant Les Hommes qui marchent, il fallait que je mette à portée de la main un cahier qui, à la fin de ma lecture, était plein de citations et de notations. Tandis que les feuilles mortes des arbres d’automne effleuraient ma fenêtre, j’avais la tête enveloppée du vent de sables de l’Algérie. J’ai vu les conte de Zohra dévoilent avec les yeux écarquillés d’une enfante captivée par les histoire de sa grand-mère.
La Transe des insoumis a verbalisé un sentiment que je n’arrivais pas à exprimer depuis la première fois que je suis allée en France il y a deux ans. Le nomadisme de mes pensées et de mes rêves m’a rendu en même temps isolée du monde extérieur et exclue de l’identité que la société m’a assigné. Je suis, comme vous l’avez brillamment dit, une identité traversière. Que je sois aux Etats-Unis ou en France, l’autre côté de l’océan, c'est encore chez moi. Je suis dans un état de séparation perpétuelle.
Heureusement, j’ai la chance de faire partie d’un programme particulier à la fac qui me fournit l’opportunité de construire des cours privés et individualisés avec mes professeurs. Ce trimestre passé, j’ai suivi une recherche de la littérature maghrébine avec une de mes professeurs. C’est dans ce cours-là que j’ai découvert vos œuvres. Pour recevoir mon diplôme l’année prochaine, il faudra que j’écrive une thèse ; votre travail m’a donné enfin une nouvelle promesse d’éclaircissement et une focalisation. C’est grâce à l’audace de votre écriture que moi j’ai le courage de m’écarter du sentier battu et de trouver mon propre chemin.
Mon analyse du paradoxe de l’indépendance qui se manifeste dans vos œuvres a déversé un torrent de pensées diverses. Je m’intéresse à la position d’un sous-ensemble marginalisé dans une population qui est déjà subjuguée d’un pouvoir externe. Comme on a vu dans votre roman Les Hommes qui marchent, la barbarie qui vous est arrivée à la fête du premier anniversaire de l’indépendance algérienne est l’apogée de cette disparité. La situation des femmes maghrébines dans une société patriarcale réduit à néant pour elles l’indépendance gagnée du colon français. Malgré cette liberté, elles se trouvent toujours esclaves de leur biologie, de leur mari, de leur culture, et de leur gouvernement.
Nous, les spectatrices et les participantes de ce paradoxe, nous demandons comment révolter contre une société qui nie la signifiance de notre existence. Et si on trouve un moyen efficace de révolter, comment assurer que notre réussite ne répétera jamais les défauts de nos oppresseurs ? Comment nous délier du cycle perpétuel de domination, de subjugation, et de révolution ? Où se trouve notre chemin à nous, un nouveau sentier dépourvu des ornières creusées par les pieds de nos prédécesseurs ?
C’est dans ces questions que j’espère trouver le fil de ma thèse future, et c’est pour demander votre opinion là-dessus que j’ai entrepris de vous écrire. Je les jette dans les airs et dans les ténèbres qui pénètrent au bout de ma compréhension de ce paradoxe apparemment inexplicable mais indéniablement pertinent. Je ne vous demande pas beaucoup—seulement un mot, une minute, une confirmation que cette lutte de compréhension vaut la peine de la battre.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
A Campaign of Indifference
We have made a grievous mistake. We have been shouting—spread feet, raised fists, chapped lips—in our opponent’s own language. He yelps back, gathering the scraps of vocabulary that we toss his way—hegemony, hierarchy, domination, imperialism—and he licks them up like a dog. But what have we done to make him understand that these rotten remnants of progressive civilization are corrupt? That which we cast off as trash is another man’s treasure—a bigger man’s treasure. A master of the alchemy of politics, he hoards the leaden millstones of a sinking society and transforms them into capitalist gold. Do we not only fuel his economy with our words? To him, imperialism is not barbarism parading as humanism—it is capital. Hegemony is not depravation—he translates it as power.
It is a curious phenomenon that criticism is perhaps an even stronger motivation than praise. Success in the face of disapproval is the greatest revenge. Biography tells us that every triumph, for it to amount to anything in the public eye, is sullied by dissent: the English teacher who told the aspiring author that she was a horrid speller; the doctor who told the terminally ill patient that he would never overcome his malady; the taunting football player who pissed on the tennis shoes of the computer geek in the locker room. Our heroes need a battle, scars, a ribbon, a medal, a near-death experience in a country far away, and a mother back home begging them not to go. Otherwise, success, survival, and the overcoming of odds would hardly count.
In the same way that our heroes’ obstacles seem to legitimize their successes, we have a curious human tendency to validate others based on the Skeletons in their Closet. I use George W. Bush for a contemporary example. It has never ceased to baffle me that the American populous could so unabashedly overlook their 43rd president’s unquestioningly average academic success. No, perhaps overlook is not the correct word, for we have ministries and commissions and committees to uncover all pitfalls of a politician’s past life, especially for a position as important of that of the president. Americans simply disregarded the fact that history and biography both quite clearly indicate George W. Bush’s dangerous mediocrity.
But why concentrate on Mr. Bush’s average grades at Yale and Harvard when the American mass media offers us a plethora of much more tantalizing Skeletons to uncover than our former president’s C’s in college? Instead, we spread the legs of our public figures and prod about, searching for scandal, adultery, sex tapes, indecent exposure, or kinky bedroom secrets. Our politicians panties are much more transparent than our government’s policies.
Are we so saturated with superficial scandal that we fail to recognize the sweeping corruption that so characterizes our government and its dignitaries? Again, I do not think this is a matter of ignorance. Instead, it is a symptom of a rather simple psychological phenomenon: the aforementioned glorification of the Skeleton in the Closet. In the brief period of my life when I regularly attended a Pentecostal church (an experience worth exploring more in depth in a separate avenue), Sins and Skeletons became synonymous. In one of the first services I attended at Christian Harbor Church, Pastor recited from the pulpit an exhaustive catalog of his personal Skeletons: drug, alcohol, and porn addiction, licentiousness, covetousness, and depression. The congregation cheered and hollered. Just look how far he’d come! The congregation commiserated with their pastor on their respective Sins, awed over his apparent success in combating these demons, and left the service with hope renewed and faith restored. If he could do it, they could too.
So let us put these too phenomenon—the compelling power of criticism and the curious case of the Skeletons in the Closet—and put them back into the context of our original subject: the politician. It is interesting to see just how many of our politicians have admitted to using drugs, to abusing alcohol, to skipping class in college, to having extramarital affairs. We criticize, yes, of course we do. But as detailed above, this judgment only bolsters the counterargument. “Yes, I admit,” says the politician (hypothetically), “to having used recreational marijuana on occasion during my university years. But,” he goes on to say, “as I matured and critically evaluated my past decisions, the experience has only fortified and refined my conviction that drugs, be they recreational or not, are utterly detestable and should remain prohibited in this great country of ours.” (Aww, cmon!)
And so our criticism, valid as it may be, bolsters his perhaps affected rebuttal. Without appearing overtly condescending, he brings himself down to our level, saying quietly that he has made the same mistakes as we do, he has experienced the same pitfalls that we stumble into, and he has understood our suffering. How Christ-like. He makes an appeal to our intellect, trusting that in our maturity, we too will understand the evils of drugs (or socialism, or alcohol, or welfare, or rebellion, or various other values too liberal for the refined mine). And lastly, he invokes patriotism, proclaiming that to be a productive member of society, we too much share his views and values. Feeling self-actualized and self-important, we rise to our feet and applaud.
Although I had not intended to discuss counterculture, an opportunity for a useful aside conveniently presents itself. Consider the word itself; it linguistically implies its opposite, making an arbitrary distinction between what is generally recognized as culture and its antithesis. Let us return to the example given above: the politician who (hypothetically) publicly admits to having partaken in recreational marijuana. Sitting on the boardwalk that skirts between culture and counterculture, he dipped his toes into the tempting waters below. He gazed into the waters to catch his own reflection and he fell in love. But a learned scholar as he was, he did not fall into the trap of Narcissus; instead, he took a step back, as to admire his reflection from a fuller angle. And from there, on his pedestal, his pulpit, his pillar, his stage, he began to preach, stronger than ever.
The fundamental defect of this dichotomous model is that both extremes mutually support one another. The waters of counterculture only reflect the color of the sky, after all. Just as a rebel without a cause is a no-good rebel, the politician’s platform is incomplete without his denunciations. The two extremes push and shove, shout and curse, point fingers and accuse. Where are we left after this perpetual battle of tug of war? With abraded palms and hoarse voices from screaming across a chasm we can’t bring ourselves to cross.
What option are we left with? We have shown how success in the face of criticism is the greatest triumph of them all, and that Skeletons in the Closet are little more than political toys. What has established itself as culture’s antithesis is simultaneously a reflection and a negation of its rival. I am tempted to propose a campaign of indifference and absenteeism. There is nothing more detestable than apathy. Instead of offering words of encouragement or words of dissuasion, offer no words at all. What motivation will the soldier departing for war have if his mother ceases to weep? The elimination of excited emotion and criticism quite effectively quenches fiery rebuttals.
But the practice of silent defiance and absenteeism is a very precarious one. Who is to say that in the absence of the dissenters, protestors, and critics, the void they leave behind will not be filled by the politicians and their propaganda? Will not the politicians’ propaganda grow even louder to make up for the silence of the critics? I worry that indifference makes us more vulnerable than ever. They have not been taking heed to our loud protests; we have only been shouting back in their own language. I’m curious as to when exactl, they would hear our silence.
I am afraid that this leaves us little farther than before. I am tangled in a paradox where our words cease to say anything at all, yet where silence, although impregnated with significance and purpose, leaves us defenseless. Where do we go from here?
It is a curious phenomenon that criticism is perhaps an even stronger motivation than praise. Success in the face of disapproval is the greatest revenge. Biography tells us that every triumph, for it to amount to anything in the public eye, is sullied by dissent: the English teacher who told the aspiring author that she was a horrid speller; the doctor who told the terminally ill patient that he would never overcome his malady; the taunting football player who pissed on the tennis shoes of the computer geek in the locker room. Our heroes need a battle, scars, a ribbon, a medal, a near-death experience in a country far away, and a mother back home begging them not to go. Otherwise, success, survival, and the overcoming of odds would hardly count.
In the same way that our heroes’ obstacles seem to legitimize their successes, we have a curious human tendency to validate others based on the Skeletons in their Closet. I use George W. Bush for a contemporary example. It has never ceased to baffle me that the American populous could so unabashedly overlook their 43rd president’s unquestioningly average academic success. No, perhaps overlook is not the correct word, for we have ministries and commissions and committees to uncover all pitfalls of a politician’s past life, especially for a position as important of that of the president. Americans simply disregarded the fact that history and biography both quite clearly indicate George W. Bush’s dangerous mediocrity.
But why concentrate on Mr. Bush’s average grades at Yale and Harvard when the American mass media offers us a plethora of much more tantalizing Skeletons to uncover than our former president’s C’s in college? Instead, we spread the legs of our public figures and prod about, searching for scandal, adultery, sex tapes, indecent exposure, or kinky bedroom secrets. Our politicians panties are much more transparent than our government’s policies.
Are we so saturated with superficial scandal that we fail to recognize the sweeping corruption that so characterizes our government and its dignitaries? Again, I do not think this is a matter of ignorance. Instead, it is a symptom of a rather simple psychological phenomenon: the aforementioned glorification of the Skeleton in the Closet. In the brief period of my life when I regularly attended a Pentecostal church (an experience worth exploring more in depth in a separate avenue), Sins and Skeletons became synonymous. In one of the first services I attended at Christian Harbor Church, Pastor recited from the pulpit an exhaustive catalog of his personal Skeletons: drug, alcohol, and porn addiction, licentiousness, covetousness, and depression. The congregation cheered and hollered. Just look how far he’d come! The congregation commiserated with their pastor on their respective Sins, awed over his apparent success in combating these demons, and left the service with hope renewed and faith restored. If he could do it, they could too.
So let us put these too phenomenon—the compelling power of criticism and the curious case of the Skeletons in the Closet—and put them back into the context of our original subject: the politician. It is interesting to see just how many of our politicians have admitted to using drugs, to abusing alcohol, to skipping class in college, to having extramarital affairs. We criticize, yes, of course we do. But as detailed above, this judgment only bolsters the counterargument. “Yes, I admit,” says the politician (hypothetically), “to having used recreational marijuana on occasion during my university years. But,” he goes on to say, “as I matured and critically evaluated my past decisions, the experience has only fortified and refined my conviction that drugs, be they recreational or not, are utterly detestable and should remain prohibited in this great country of ours.” (Aww, cmon!)
And so our criticism, valid as it may be, bolsters his perhaps affected rebuttal. Without appearing overtly condescending, he brings himself down to our level, saying quietly that he has made the same mistakes as we do, he has experienced the same pitfalls that we stumble into, and he has understood our suffering. How Christ-like. He makes an appeal to our intellect, trusting that in our maturity, we too will understand the evils of drugs (or socialism, or alcohol, or welfare, or rebellion, or various other values too liberal for the refined mine). And lastly, he invokes patriotism, proclaiming that to be a productive member of society, we too much share his views and values. Feeling self-actualized and self-important, we rise to our feet and applaud.
Although I had not intended to discuss counterculture, an opportunity for a useful aside conveniently presents itself. Consider the word itself; it linguistically implies its opposite, making an arbitrary distinction between what is generally recognized as culture and its antithesis. Let us return to the example given above: the politician who (hypothetically) publicly admits to having partaken in recreational marijuana. Sitting on the boardwalk that skirts between culture and counterculture, he dipped his toes into the tempting waters below. He gazed into the waters to catch his own reflection and he fell in love. But a learned scholar as he was, he did not fall into the trap of Narcissus; instead, he took a step back, as to admire his reflection from a fuller angle. And from there, on his pedestal, his pulpit, his pillar, his stage, he began to preach, stronger than ever.
The fundamental defect of this dichotomous model is that both extremes mutually support one another. The waters of counterculture only reflect the color of the sky, after all. Just as a rebel without a cause is a no-good rebel, the politician’s platform is incomplete without his denunciations. The two extremes push and shove, shout and curse, point fingers and accuse. Where are we left after this perpetual battle of tug of war? With abraded palms and hoarse voices from screaming across a chasm we can’t bring ourselves to cross.
What option are we left with? We have shown how success in the face of criticism is the greatest triumph of them all, and that Skeletons in the Closet are little more than political toys. What has established itself as culture’s antithesis is simultaneously a reflection and a negation of its rival. I am tempted to propose a campaign of indifference and absenteeism. There is nothing more detestable than apathy. Instead of offering words of encouragement or words of dissuasion, offer no words at all. What motivation will the soldier departing for war have if his mother ceases to weep? The elimination of excited emotion and criticism quite effectively quenches fiery rebuttals.
But the practice of silent defiance and absenteeism is a very precarious one. Who is to say that in the absence of the dissenters, protestors, and critics, the void they leave behind will not be filled by the politicians and their propaganda? Will not the politicians’ propaganda grow even louder to make up for the silence of the critics? I worry that indifference makes us more vulnerable than ever. They have not been taking heed to our loud protests; we have only been shouting back in their own language. I’m curious as to when exactl, they would hear our silence.
I am afraid that this leaves us little farther than before. I am tangled in a paradox where our words cease to say anything at all, yet where silence, although impregnated with significance and purpose, leaves us defenseless. Where do we go from here?
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Abject
I was seventeen the first time I did it for money. They put me on a podium and mispronounced my name. The judges handed me a check and my name in ink on a certificate. I had become a commodity that they took under their sheets to devour late at night. My English teacher was proud. Augs beamed when I showed her my anthologized self and she ran her index finger down the spine of the book. Open me, buy me, won’t you? I will sell myself to you.
They congratulated me over the morning announcements. I was sitting in biology class on fish dissection day, ambivalent. My creationist biology teacher wanted to know what my short story was about. In fewer words, I told him that I had written about the tragic inevitability of the quotidian and the ravages of routine. The story was about a city overseas that I wouldn’t visit for another year and a half and hapless crowds of people whose comings and goings on the sidewalk marked the hours like clockwork. The protagonist was a lackluster engine salesman; when his artist girlfriend left him, she stole his espresso machine. He drank his coffee with cream and vanilla and didn’t know his girlfriend’s favorite flower. It was painful, predictable, the kind of story where the reader will mope a bit at the conclusion because they feel they’re supposed to, but unsure as to why. I was dissatisfied with the piece. It was shallow and it was cheap, but the judges for the creative writing contest at the local college bought it and bound it all the same.
The anthology was thinner than I had hoped, less regal, less stout. It felt limp and lifeless in my hands. When I tore off its skin, the contents were all where they were supposed to be: the fibrous pulp of memoirs, the fat of fiction, the coiled entrails of poetry winding in switchbacks across the page. It smelled like fresh ink. Words floated in the murky translucence of cheap paper and titles were stuck on like masking tape on preserving jars. I found a misplaced comma as I sorted through the bowels of my short story. I wanted to gouge it out with a scalpel.
When I read my own writing, I am often overcome by a horrifying nausea like at the first whiff of chemicals upon opening a sealed dissection bag. The sight of something so recently alive paralyzed in parallel lines makes me retch. Dry heaves claw up my gullet and threaten to expel themselves in inky splotches all over the page. I am compelled to delete, to shred, to erase the evidence of my insides exposed. Nonfiction is the worst. I lay myself down on the surgical stage, spread-eagle, palms up as I come at myself with forceps. I can see my toes; my feet are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius. Under the penetrating gaze of my writer-self, I want to find my insides clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when I peel back my plasticized skin and pin it to the table and the page.
Writing is not butchery. It is vivisection.
I can’t stop doing it. I carve up my skin with razor blades. Adorning my past with adjectives feels like giving a name to a dissection animal. Is it sick or is it humanizing? Or perhaps the grotesque is edifying in and of itself. I tear myself to shreds to extract a memory tumor from my brain. I place it on the table, prod it, poke it, peek inside to see what I couldn’t recognize while it was still in my body. I learn about it and then put it in a jar on a shelf with my books and try not to open it again for fear of the smell.
My mind and my body can’t seem to coexist. When I write I often forget to eat, to drink. My mouth turns to cotton as I speak out of my fingertips and not my lips. I huddle inside a moment of suspension, confusing what’s real and what I want to be real. That shadow scurrying through the black hedgerows looks familiar and I fall in love again with characters I’m sure that once I knew. I dig up bygone lovers and try to remember what rain felt like sizzling on our sunburned skin. I revitalize our barren seasons, but it’s Another who relives them. My surrogate self vicariously inhabits my memories so I don’t have to.
I cannot stop writing my own autobiography, but when bits of it scare me, I become she, and an arbitrary third party buckles under my trauma, not me. Once, while blacked out in a bed in France that smelled like lavender, I explained to the paper what had happened to her. In the morning, when I woke devoid of recollection of the night before, the page told me the curious story of a girl thrust against bathroom tiles that smelled of piss and of smoke and stuck to her skin. On her purpling flesh there was bruising in patterns that followed the path of those anonymous hands. They prowled like the conquerors of a strange new land that was never theirs to explore. I slice her story into to a six-stanza poem. Her dismembered body floats in poetry, without a name, without a face. She can’t possibly be me. I have moved on; she dangles in disbelief. But I am she as you are she as you are me and we are all together.
When I write about France and its lavender kisses, I am tempted to only reconstruct the landscape that I love. I muffle the misogynistic mumbles of men and replace them with the whispers of a lesbian lover. I take the snipping sheers of poetic license and excise the poisonous parts of my memory until I barely recognize my voice in the paper-mirror. Although I remove all that makes me wretched and rotten, my body is no cleaner than before. Scalpel cuts still leave chalky scars, mocking my attempt at self-healing. My endeavors to cleanse myself leave me carved up and disfigured. My body becomes a battleground, pitted with deep-dug trenches. I cease to respect it; I objectify it, abjectify it. My body can be sold like my writing. Open me, buy me, won’t you?
I expected the girl who had been violated on bathroom tiles to wither and die on the page where I had left her. I had excised her experience from my memory and those pathetic six stanzas shouldn’t have been able to survive once severed from myself. I hated her. In the poem, she is reduced to a number. She becomes the unfortunate numerator of a fraction of the population, the dirty minority placed on a pedestal above the innocent denominator. The Assaulted. The Abused. The Victim. I make her as much of a stranger to myself as she was to him—that anonymous Moroccan man who followed her to the bathroom of the bar and barricaded her exit with his big hands that smelled of turmeric and shisha tobacco. She hadn’t consented to this.
***
Upon my return from France, my own country and my own body felt foreign to me. The English tongue gagged me. I stopped eating. I stopped speaking. It was me that was shriveling up, not her. Upon finding me huddled like a fetus on our bathroom’s tiles, my parents decided to take me to Canada. Any international border would do.
About halfway through Pennsylvania in the backseat of my family’s van, I started writing. I didn’t stop until Montréal. I could hardly write coherent sentences. I was reading Kerouac at the time and my desperate lines roamed like Sal Paradise, trying to find some concrete destination or someplace to call home. But that filthy girl kept creeping up on me, no matter where I wandered. She limped across my lines. She didn’t wither and die like I had expected her to. The words remained as bloody and bold on the page as they were when I first wrote them, blacked out in my bed in France. And much to by petrified surprise, they began to have a heartbeat of their own.
In the feverish writing that I expelled during my expatriate escape to Canada, that girl with the purpling flesh was depicted over and over again. She appeared in one story as a whore, in another as a lesbian, and in another as a victim of sexual assault. I couldn’t create enough fictionalized surrogates to keep up with my successive repulsions and repressions of that memory. My mother suggested therapy. My therapist called it post-traumatic stress disorder, which I vehemently denied despite my blackouts and nightmares and displacement and guilt. I avoided public bathrooms for months, but I still crawled back to France a year later, to that city that loves me yet damns me.
***
A summer evening the next July—the twenty-first, to be exact—I was sitting on the banks of the Rhône in Avignon, writing a short story about an encounter I once had with a prostitute in a bus stop. Each evening around ten, a camp of white vans sets up in the parking lots outside of Avignon’s ramparts. Prostitutes sit in the driver’s seat with their legs splayed on the dashboard, a red light dangling from the mirror to illuminate their cleavage and inner thighs. By midnight they drift into the bus stops and stand with their hands on their hips, their broken bodies angled in fluorescence. I used to trek through their territory on my walk home from the bars. Eventually, I grew used to the heckling, to the violating stares and gawking from café terraces, to the beer bottles hurled by boozy boys perched like vultures on the rampart walls. But I was alone once—a mistake. A prostitute wearing leather and bangles like chains howled at me in French and in gibberish. I gagged at the thought of the toils and snares that had made a wretch like her. I left her to her nightly predators.
I wanted to redeem her and to respect her body in a way that she had forgotten how to do, so I tried to write about her months after the incident. But the story was rudely hacked off in the middle of a word. As I was writing, a stranger sat down next to me on the banks of that river and told me that my eyes looked magnificent in the evening light. The tired refrain of hollow lust commanded me to gather my things and leave, but my Jeep was parked a fifteen minute walk away, and I was yet again, mistakenly, alone. There is a picture of me on his digital camera. He captured my profile without my consent as I looked away to the horizon, trying to ignore him, trying to remain calm despite his hungry eyes. When his searching fingers seized my neck I screamed at him in French and in gibberish and ran.
The story I had been writing remains unfinished. I was writing myself in circles, objectifying her every much as the men had, deconstructing her body in details, eroticizing her fingernails, her ankles, the zipper on her bodice. The last full sentence reads: “It was an outfit for fumbling fingers to remove in the dark.” The prostitute’s story is my story is ours. I hope I never finish it. It’s a case still left open for consideration. I have not yet buried that woman in her stereotyped paper grave. A sentence without a period still holds hope for redemption.
***
When I left France for the second time, I wept on the train that hurtled me north away from Avignon. I had fallen in love with a country that left purpling bruises on my skin. Upon my return to the United States, it was cloudy in Ohio and uncharacteristically chilly. My parents did their best to make me feel comfortable. They let me talk when I needed to and more often left me to my silence. I unburied my journal from the year before from where I had shelved it among a cemetery of dead authors. With the morbid fascination of a mourner at a wake, I peeked inside. That girl was still there, a forgotten orphan in her spiral-bound cradle, abandoned but still alive.
Sometimes when I sit at my keyboard she inhabits my fingers, begging to be remembered for what she is—an ostracized organ no less vital than the spleen. I can’t heal without her; I bleed without clotting, I harbor bacteria in my blood without being able to filter it. I lay myself back down on the surgeon’s stainless steel, open up my chest cavity, and put her back inside where she belongs.
They congratulated me over the morning announcements. I was sitting in biology class on fish dissection day, ambivalent. My creationist biology teacher wanted to know what my short story was about. In fewer words, I told him that I had written about the tragic inevitability of the quotidian and the ravages of routine. The story was about a city overseas that I wouldn’t visit for another year and a half and hapless crowds of people whose comings and goings on the sidewalk marked the hours like clockwork. The protagonist was a lackluster engine salesman; when his artist girlfriend left him, she stole his espresso machine. He drank his coffee with cream and vanilla and didn’t know his girlfriend’s favorite flower. It was painful, predictable, the kind of story where the reader will mope a bit at the conclusion because they feel they’re supposed to, but unsure as to why. I was dissatisfied with the piece. It was shallow and it was cheap, but the judges for the creative writing contest at the local college bought it and bound it all the same.
The anthology was thinner than I had hoped, less regal, less stout. It felt limp and lifeless in my hands. When I tore off its skin, the contents were all where they were supposed to be: the fibrous pulp of memoirs, the fat of fiction, the coiled entrails of poetry winding in switchbacks across the page. It smelled like fresh ink. Words floated in the murky translucence of cheap paper and titles were stuck on like masking tape on preserving jars. I found a misplaced comma as I sorted through the bowels of my short story. I wanted to gouge it out with a scalpel.
When I read my own writing, I am often overcome by a horrifying nausea like at the first whiff of chemicals upon opening a sealed dissection bag. The sight of something so recently alive paralyzed in parallel lines makes me retch. Dry heaves claw up my gullet and threaten to expel themselves in inky splotches all over the page. I am compelled to delete, to shred, to erase the evidence of my insides exposed. Nonfiction is the worst. I lay myself down on the surgical stage, spread-eagle, palms up as I come at myself with forceps. I can see my toes; my feet are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius. Under the penetrating gaze of my writer-self, I want to find my insides clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when I peel back my plasticized skin and pin it to the table and the page.
Writing is not butchery. It is vivisection.
I can’t stop doing it. I carve up my skin with razor blades. Adorning my past with adjectives feels like giving a name to a dissection animal. Is it sick or is it humanizing? Or perhaps the grotesque is edifying in and of itself. I tear myself to shreds to extract a memory tumor from my brain. I place it on the table, prod it, poke it, peek inside to see what I couldn’t recognize while it was still in my body. I learn about it and then put it in a jar on a shelf with my books and try not to open it again for fear of the smell.
My mind and my body can’t seem to coexist. When I write I often forget to eat, to drink. My mouth turns to cotton as I speak out of my fingertips and not my lips. I huddle inside a moment of suspension, confusing what’s real and what I want to be real. That shadow scurrying through the black hedgerows looks familiar and I fall in love again with characters I’m sure that once I knew. I dig up bygone lovers and try to remember what rain felt like sizzling on our sunburned skin. I revitalize our barren seasons, but it’s Another who relives them. My surrogate self vicariously inhabits my memories so I don’t have to.
I cannot stop writing my own autobiography, but when bits of it scare me, I become she, and an arbitrary third party buckles under my trauma, not me. Once, while blacked out in a bed in France that smelled like lavender, I explained to the paper what had happened to her. In the morning, when I woke devoid of recollection of the night before, the page told me the curious story of a girl thrust against bathroom tiles that smelled of piss and of smoke and stuck to her skin. On her purpling flesh there was bruising in patterns that followed the path of those anonymous hands. They prowled like the conquerors of a strange new land that was never theirs to explore. I slice her story into to a six-stanza poem. Her dismembered body floats in poetry, without a name, without a face. She can’t possibly be me. I have moved on; she dangles in disbelief. But I am she as you are she as you are me and we are all together.
When I write about France and its lavender kisses, I am tempted to only reconstruct the landscape that I love. I muffle the misogynistic mumbles of men and replace them with the whispers of a lesbian lover. I take the snipping sheers of poetic license and excise the poisonous parts of my memory until I barely recognize my voice in the paper-mirror. Although I remove all that makes me wretched and rotten, my body is no cleaner than before. Scalpel cuts still leave chalky scars, mocking my attempt at self-healing. My endeavors to cleanse myself leave me carved up and disfigured. My body becomes a battleground, pitted with deep-dug trenches. I cease to respect it; I objectify it, abjectify it. My body can be sold like my writing. Open me, buy me, won’t you?
I expected the girl who had been violated on bathroom tiles to wither and die on the page where I had left her. I had excised her experience from my memory and those pathetic six stanzas shouldn’t have been able to survive once severed from myself. I hated her. In the poem, she is reduced to a number. She becomes the unfortunate numerator of a fraction of the population, the dirty minority placed on a pedestal above the innocent denominator. The Assaulted. The Abused. The Victim. I make her as much of a stranger to myself as she was to him—that anonymous Moroccan man who followed her to the bathroom of the bar and barricaded her exit with his big hands that smelled of turmeric and shisha tobacco. She hadn’t consented to this.
***
Upon my return from France, my own country and my own body felt foreign to me. The English tongue gagged me. I stopped eating. I stopped speaking. It was me that was shriveling up, not her. Upon finding me huddled like a fetus on our bathroom’s tiles, my parents decided to take me to Canada. Any international border would do.
About halfway through Pennsylvania in the backseat of my family’s van, I started writing. I didn’t stop until Montréal. I could hardly write coherent sentences. I was reading Kerouac at the time and my desperate lines roamed like Sal Paradise, trying to find some concrete destination or someplace to call home. But that filthy girl kept creeping up on me, no matter where I wandered. She limped across my lines. She didn’t wither and die like I had expected her to. The words remained as bloody and bold on the page as they were when I first wrote them, blacked out in my bed in France. And much to by petrified surprise, they began to have a heartbeat of their own.
In the feverish writing that I expelled during my expatriate escape to Canada, that girl with the purpling flesh was depicted over and over again. She appeared in one story as a whore, in another as a lesbian, and in another as a victim of sexual assault. I couldn’t create enough fictionalized surrogates to keep up with my successive repulsions and repressions of that memory. My mother suggested therapy. My therapist called it post-traumatic stress disorder, which I vehemently denied despite my blackouts and nightmares and displacement and guilt. I avoided public bathrooms for months, but I still crawled back to France a year later, to that city that loves me yet damns me.
***
A summer evening the next July—the twenty-first, to be exact—I was sitting on the banks of the Rhône in Avignon, writing a short story about an encounter I once had with a prostitute in a bus stop. Each evening around ten, a camp of white vans sets up in the parking lots outside of Avignon’s ramparts. Prostitutes sit in the driver’s seat with their legs splayed on the dashboard, a red light dangling from the mirror to illuminate their cleavage and inner thighs. By midnight they drift into the bus stops and stand with their hands on their hips, their broken bodies angled in fluorescence. I used to trek through their territory on my walk home from the bars. Eventually, I grew used to the heckling, to the violating stares and gawking from café terraces, to the beer bottles hurled by boozy boys perched like vultures on the rampart walls. But I was alone once—a mistake. A prostitute wearing leather and bangles like chains howled at me in French and in gibberish. I gagged at the thought of the toils and snares that had made a wretch like her. I left her to her nightly predators.
I wanted to redeem her and to respect her body in a way that she had forgotten how to do, so I tried to write about her months after the incident. But the story was rudely hacked off in the middle of a word. As I was writing, a stranger sat down next to me on the banks of that river and told me that my eyes looked magnificent in the evening light. The tired refrain of hollow lust commanded me to gather my things and leave, but my Jeep was parked a fifteen minute walk away, and I was yet again, mistakenly, alone. There is a picture of me on his digital camera. He captured my profile without my consent as I looked away to the horizon, trying to ignore him, trying to remain calm despite his hungry eyes. When his searching fingers seized my neck I screamed at him in French and in gibberish and ran.
The story I had been writing remains unfinished. I was writing myself in circles, objectifying her every much as the men had, deconstructing her body in details, eroticizing her fingernails, her ankles, the zipper on her bodice. The last full sentence reads: “It was an outfit for fumbling fingers to remove in the dark.” The prostitute’s story is my story is ours. I hope I never finish it. It’s a case still left open for consideration. I have not yet buried that woman in her stereotyped paper grave. A sentence without a period still holds hope for redemption.
***
When I left France for the second time, I wept on the train that hurtled me north away from Avignon. I had fallen in love with a country that left purpling bruises on my skin. Upon my return to the United States, it was cloudy in Ohio and uncharacteristically chilly. My parents did their best to make me feel comfortable. They let me talk when I needed to and more often left me to my silence. I unburied my journal from the year before from where I had shelved it among a cemetery of dead authors. With the morbid fascination of a mourner at a wake, I peeked inside. That girl was still there, a forgotten orphan in her spiral-bound cradle, abandoned but still alive.
Sometimes when I sit at my keyboard she inhabits my fingers, begging to be remembered for what she is—an ostracized organ no less vital than the spleen. I can’t heal without her; I bleed without clotting, I harbor bacteria in my blood without being able to filter it. I lay myself back down on the surgeon’s stainless steel, open up my chest cavity, and put her back inside where she belongs.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Two Men on a Bench
"Tell me what you see," said the blind man to the deaf man, but the latter did not respond. The blind man heard a moan from his neighbor and thought to himself, "He must be blind, like me."
The deaf man was watching the lips of his comrade, falling in the unshapely grimaces of a man who has never looked in a mirror and watched himself speak.
"What do I look like when I speak?" asked the deaf man of the blind man, gesturing with his hands in the only language he could formulate, but this latter did not respond. He continued to stare straight ahead, as though deep in thought. The deaf man sighed audibly at this lack of response, although he couldn't hear the breath between his lips.
What misfortune, thought the blind man, listening to his neighbor's breathing. Two blind men on a bench with nothing to say to one another.
He reached out and took his neighbor's hand.
The deaf man was watching the lips of his comrade, falling in the unshapely grimaces of a man who has never looked in a mirror and watched himself speak.
"What do I look like when I speak?" asked the deaf man of the blind man, gesturing with his hands in the only language he could formulate, but this latter did not respond. He continued to stare straight ahead, as though deep in thought. The deaf man sighed audibly at this lack of response, although he couldn't hear the breath between his lips.
What misfortune, thought the blind man, listening to his neighbor's breathing. Two blind men on a bench with nothing to say to one another.
He reached out and took his neighbor's hand.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Deflower
Through the paneled window of the classroom door, the gentle curve of Miss Lily’s forearm could be seen, and her slender wrist, poised at the chalkboard, and her willowy fingers, grasping a piece of fresh chalk. A silver bangle slid off her wrist like an unsuccessful manacle and rested half way down her forearm where the sleek line of the limb broadened, just before soft angle of the elbow. Chalk dust powdered her delicate fingers with white, making them ashen, pale in contrast with the smooth, sun-bronzed flesh on the back of her tiny, almost infantile hands.
Her rouged lips parted slightly, like a small child’s in anticipation of a lollipop, forming a perfect “O.” A sea of first graders gazed in awe as Miss Lily drew circles on the chalkboard.
“Looonely,” said Miss Lily, reminding her students of the letters and sounds that they had learned in kindergarten, but had left behind in the languid summer days. “Moooan. Ooown. Can anyone tell me another word that has an ‘O’ sound in it?” She pursed her red lollipop lips into another circle.
Five fingers appeared sheepishly in the air from the back row.
“Yes, Michael?”
“Umm . . . nooo?”
The freckle on Miss Lily’s left cheek disappeared into a dimple as a smile blossomed across her face. “Yes! Very good. Any other ideas?”
The first graders fed off of Miss Lily’s enthusiasm, and were excited now too, spewing word confetti from jabbering mouths.
“Go!” “Home!” “Don’t!” “Show!”
Miss Lily drew the long, straight line of an “I” next to the white circles on the board.
“What about ‘I’ sounds? For example, spyyy. Miiine.”
“Bye!” “Cry!” “Die!” “Eye!”
It was only Miss Lily’s second week at Kidron Elementary School, but her students fawned over her already. They stared at her with wide, amorous eyes, absorbing her with a sycophantic gaze. At recess, the girls tried to braid her long, auburn hair while the boys tugged at her skirts for her attention.
From the hallway, through the window in the door, Principal Richard watched as first graders clambered from their miniature desks and rushed to the front of the room as Miss Lily announced the end of the day’s phonetics lesson. Groping at her feet and ankles, they encircled her, like bees on the open face of a sunflower or moths swarming around a candle at night. Crouching on their knees before her stool, the first graders looked on as Miss Lily cracked open Snow White and they clapped their hands and all chanted in unison when she got to the good parts.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . “
* * *
At lunch, Jan Donnelly, the school’s secretary, sought out Miss Lily in the library. She peaked her deflated puff hairdo out from behind the stack of Hardy Boy mysteries and Miss Lily nearly choked on her carrot in surprise. Jan was a purple nails and hair spray type, with a mouth as big as her fist that she always crammed full of tic-tacs and mentos. She hated children, but had adored Principal Richard since they graduated together thirteen years back; she kept her position as the elementary school’s secretary simply so she could watch which students’ mothers he kept suspiciously long in his locked, windowless office. She marked them down in a notebook that she kept in her desk drawer, under her mints.
“He likes you, ya know,” Jan announced, flopping into the chair opposite Miss Lily’s.
Miss Lily looked up bashfully, blushing. Jan forged on despite the rosy tint blooming on the young teacher’s cheek. Miss Lily huddled a little, feeling fragile.
“I’m not sure I understand. To whom are you referring?”
“Well, Dick, dummy,” snapped Jan. She puckered her glossed lips and violently sucked her mentos. “Principal Richard! You must have noticed the way he looks at you. He comes back to the office after hallway rounds drooling so much that I swear I’ll have to mop one of these days!”
Jan leaned forward on the table and her cleavage spilled out of her v-neck blouse. Miss Lily slumped and shifted uncomfortably under Jan’s covetous stare, and she averted her eyes, examining instead the collection of Berenstain Bears books.
Undeterred, Jan launched ahead, her lecherous eyes widening. “And whenever he gets back from staff meetings he locks himself in his office for, like, twenty minutes. And we all know what that means.” She snorted and kept on sucking.
Miss Lily wasn’t sure what to make of Jan’s assertive declaration, but she felt threatened by it, and crossed her legs and pulled her cardigan a bit tighter around her shoulders, instinctively covering her protruding collarbones and the tender skin at the nape of her neck.
Principal Richard, though barely thirty, hadn’t aged well. His facial fat puddled around his chin, and grizzly bushes of chest hair poked their frizzled heads out of the top button of his dress shirts. When he wore a tie, he used it solely to wipe his armpits of their forever expanding sweat stains.
“But I shouldn’t say that, it makes him sound perverse,” Jan continued, punctuating Miss Lily’s awkward silence. “He coaches youth softball and supports the booster club and all that. He’s harmless— he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Really. He stopped fishing the way normal folks do it because he hated skewering maggots and worms, and now he just fly fishes. Cuz they don’t use real flies, you know.”
Miss Lily didn’t know. She was preoccupied with the horrific image of Principal Richard’s characteristically sweaty personage guiding a young girl’s hand on a wooden bat, teaching her how to swing strong and hit the ball.
Jan extended her pudgy fingers and plucked a carrot from Miss Lily’s plate. Between crunches, she asked, “What’s a Saratoga city slicker doing in bumblefuck Kidron, Ohio anyhow? I mean, there’s nothing here except for two hardware stores and three Mennonite churches. Hell, if you want alcohol or sex or anything you have to go the whole way to Akron, or ravage the Amish kids on rumspringa, and that’s just a drag.”
Miss Lily sighed, and looked away ruefully. “Well, there was a small situation that I felt that I needed to get away from, and Kidron seemed like a nice place to escape and relax out of the public eye for a while.”
Jan pounced. “I bet it was a man, wasn’t it? Oh, this is good. I’ve heard about those big-time horse race gamblers up in Saratoga. They treat their women like their horses. If ya don’t put out, you’re out the door like a horse with a stitch in its calf on the backstretch. Yeah, this is real good stuff.”
Silently, Miss Lily moved on from her carrots to her celery. Jan looked beyond Miss Lily’s right ear as a stocky shadow darkened the doorway.
Leaping up from the table, Jan exclaimed, “Honey, now’s your chance!” She bounded to the young teacher’s side, and whispered in her ear: “The fastest way to his heart is jelly beans. I know it. I’ll tell him to give you a call tonight.” Miss Lily crumpled, like a morning glory at the approach of the noontime sun, folding its petals into itself. Then, leaving her half-finished lunch on the table and Jan amongst the National Geographics, Miss Lily pushed wordlessly past Principal Richard’s gut in the doorway and tumbled into the hallway, then fled to her classroom.
At the end of the school day, Miss Lily bustled out the door before the last echoes of the bell had dissipated, narrowly avoiding Principal Richard’s bug-eyed attempts to flag her down to invite her to that evening’s softball tournament game. She had grown accustomed to taking the two-mile journey home by foot, but now she regretted it. The walk took Miss Lily by the ballpark, down to the crossroads that served as the village square, and past the Town and Country store where crotchety old men sat gathering dust in rickety rocking chairs in the afternoons, smoking pipes, talking about the year’s corn harvest, and jeering at children as they walked home from school. The old men whooped and hollered at Miss Lily’s smooth, lean calves that peaked out from under her sundress as she scuttled past, but went back to grumbling about the uppity New Yawker once she had gone by. Miss Lily had paid a dying farmer an exorbitant sum for an old farmhouse at the top of Emerson Hill, and allowed prime soybean soil to degenerate into a field of wildflowers.
Beyond the farmhouse’s westward facing front porch, Kidron valley stretched out in a patchwork quilt of fields. On clear evenings, the crack of a bat punctuated the sticky early September air as little legs sprinted in diamonds to the cheers of parents and Principal Richard. But Miss Lily sat inside, where the air was still and damp, behind closed doors and thick window glass, and slowly took the phone off the hook. From the softball field, where Mr. Richard’s team jumped into each other’s arms and clapped hands, celebrating that evening’s victory, Miss Lily’s house could be seen, blazing in the already darkened Eastern sky, then suddenly, like a candle, the lights snuffed out.
* * *
When Miss Lily arrived at the school the next morning, she successfully snuck past the office, but found Jan lurking by her classroom door. She followed the young teacher into the empty classroom.
“I tried to call ya last night but the phone was busy for hours. Who were you talking to for so long, huh?” Jan didn’t skip a beat to wait for a response. “No doubt that New York man. Is he gonna come down here and try to find you or what? Don’t tell Dick about him, by the way. He’s a nice guy but he’s a bit of a jealous type and it’s the envious ones that make the most trouble.”
“There’s no New York man, Miss Donnelly.”
Jan’s nose scrunched up into her closely set eyes and her bottom lip sagged stupidly. She jutted out her chin, perplexed. Then, like a baby doll whose plastic eyelids open and close when you shake it, Jan’s eyes bulged suddenly.
“You cheated on him, didn’t you? And you’re escaping his horrific, erotic wrath! That’s obviously it. No one comes to Kidron because they actually like it here.” She snickered in the falsetto of a sixth grade boy who has just learned the word “fuck,” and giggled at her own risqué fantasy. She was lingering in the doorframe where the first graders had taped up fall leaf cutouts, and looked like a floozy in a toy store. Miss Lily was becoming nauseous with disdain, and slumped into her desk chair, feeling faint.
“You feelin’ alright honey? And what’s up with the snowsuit?” Jan breached the threshold of the doorway, penetrating into the classroom, and reached out to tug on the sleeve of Miss Lily’s modest sweater. “It’s hot as blazes in here! You’re going to melt like a popsicle on the sidewalk by lunch unless you strip that heavy thing off.”
“I think I’m getting sick. I woke up this morning with the chills, and I’m afraid it might be terribly contagious,” said Miss Lily meekly, and she feigned a delicate cough.
Jan scoffed but moved a step away. “I’ll get Dick to fix something up for you,” she insisted. “He’d just love to show his sympathetic side.” She slunk out of the classroom with a wink.
Halfway through math class, Jan’s animated face appeared in the window of the classroom door, and she knocked with the enthusiasm of a carpetbagger selling cosmetics in rich suburbs. Miss Lily begrudgingly opened the door, and Jan thrust in, a mug of tea in hand.
“From Dick,” she whispered in Miss Lily’s ear as she swept past, placing the steaming mug on her desk and producing honey packets from her pocket. “And he sent some cough drops too. You’re lucky to have a sweet guy like him after you.”
Miss Lily said nothing in response but ushered the secretary out the door, claiming the pressing importance of basic addition. She let the chamomile tea set until it was too cold to drink and gave out cough drops as prizes for correct math.
On her walk home that afternoon, the rusty men stationed outside Kidron Town & Country didn’t hoot at Miss Lily as she hurried past their chairs and into the store. She was looking wet from the humidity, dripping almost, and her shiny hair was deflated, and her wide legged pants hid her sculpted legs. They shook their heads and wagged their drooping chins and commiserated, “They must not have humidity up there in Sar’toga.” When Miss Lily emerged from the store a few minutes later with a full bolt of dark blue calico fabric, they wondered if a city girl would know how to sew.
* * *
When softball season ended, the panel of old men on Kidron Town & Country’s front porch noticed the abrupt absence of their favorite object of observation. Miss Lily had stopped walking to work, knowing that Principal Richard would no longer be occupied directly after school with little girls, bats, and balls, and the walk left her feeling exposed, vulnerable. Principal Richard’s team had cleaned up the tournament season victoriously, but Miss Lily hadn’t heard the cheers from the ballpark. Instead, she was holed up in her house, sewing dark blue curtains in the pantry, the only room that didn’t have windows. The farmhouse’s wide-eyed front windows stared vacantly into the sultry night, and inside, Miss Lily pricked her fingers on needles in the dark.
Below, in the valley, the ballpark’s lights flickered then went out, and in the sticky Indian summer night little girls were treated to post-game hot dogs. Miss Lily’s phone rang and rang after the victory, and her caller ID lit up with the elementary school’s office number. She called the phone company to have them disconnect her home phone, and waited on the line until she heard the dull beep of solitude.
Miss Lily searched for Principal Richard’s address in the staff directory, and wrote it on a slip of paper that she taped to her bathroom mirror, along with his phone number and email address and the names of his closest friends and family. She poured over maps of the little village, marking streets that the man would likely be on, and at what times. With operative diligence, Miss Lily shadowed Principal Richard’s routine, from his 6:45 cup of coffee and cinnamon toast at the downtown Bliss Café, to his afternoon pit stop at Kidron Town & Country to jabber with the men in their rocking chairs, and to the houses of his friends, where he played and lost at poker. On Tuesday, it was Doug’s, where the wife served chip dip and didn’t let them stay past ten-thirty. Thursday’s Bud Light and football explained the lack of Friday morning meetings. On Sundays, he fished. Miss Lily tracked his movements, and put ostensible stars on the map to demarcate his stomping ground.
When Miss Lily knocked on Jan’s door while Principal Richard was away at an administrative meeting, the secretary was delighted to usher her in. Autumn parent-teacher conferences were fast approaching, and Miss Lily had become morbidly obsessed with the contents of the notebook that Jan kept in her desk drawer. Miss Lily could no longer stand to look at her first graders without knowing which of their mothers had grasped the worn leatherette of Principal Richard’s belt, or burrowed their lips into his glutinous neck.
“Getting jealous, huh?” said Jan with a wink and a nudge.
Miss Lily flipped open the notebook, and read aloud with a trembling voice. “January 28th, meatball sub day, Ms. Hampshire (formerly Mrs. Withrich), suspicious scraping chairs sounds and a misplaced woman’s watch. April 17th, English as a Second Language testing, Miss Ruiz (mother of Amber Ruiz), candle-induced fire alarm, blamed on faulty microwave popcorn. June 3rd, Field Day, Mrs. Wilson (head of PTO Classroom Mothers Committee), missing order of popsicles, whipped cream, and waterslide lubricant.” Miss Lily flicked through the pages with the voracity of a teenage boy peeping at a stolen porn magazine in a gas station bathroom. She simply couldn’t stop reading. Jan looked on with pride, and her lips twisted into
a proprietary smirk.
* * *
When Miss Lily’s Honda pulled into Lehman’s Hardware’s parking lot across the square from Kidron Town & Country, the white heads nearly spilled out of their rocking chairs with surprise. For weeks, they had only seen her car zoom through the intersection and head up Emerson Hill even before the busses had come by. They missed her cleavage and sundresses and calves and small hands. Although the autumn weather was still warm, Miss Lily appeared wearing black dress pants and a turtleneck, and her hair was tied back in a bun. Bug-eyed sunglasses hid most of her face. Miss Lily emerged from the hardware staggering under the weight of a stack of square-cut mirrors, and drove off again, leaving the old men rocking and wondering and watching as her car snaked up Emerson Road to her house on the hill.
The hoary old men had been right—Miss Lily couldn’t sew. The unfinished curtains lay crumpled in a pile in the pantry, where she had sat for nights on end, bleeding on the fabric as she clumsily attempted to make neat stitches in the calico. Miss Lily was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the pantry amongst her dwindling supply of canned vegetables and now nearly empty stock of fresh fruit. If she couldn’t block out the penetrating night and its peering eyes, she need some way to ensure her security within her own house. Miss Lily banished dark alcoves and blind corners, and set up mirrors to illuminate every nook. While standing at the sink, she could now see into the shower, and from the kitchen table she had a view of the back porch. She lined the baseboard of her bedroom with mirrors, so she could chase monsters out from under her bed without even having to get down on her knees.
With a simple trick of light, Miss Lily was replicated a hundred times over. She caught a glimpse of her facial profile while turning a corner, and her own reflection followed her up the stairs to her bedroom. In this new house of mirrors, she was fascinated by curves of her body that she had never seen before. Pulling off her turtleneck, Miss Lily found an indentation in the small of her back, where her spine met her slender hips. Undressing in the mirror, she examined her hamstrings, the backs of her kneecaps, the curvature of her neck. Miss Lily wondered at the translucency of her skin, now pale and powdery, ashen from the abrupt lack of exposure to sunlight. Her limbs, once lean, were now skeletal, and her elbows jutted out at broken angles. Miss Lily pursed her unglossed lips, and watched herself unsuccessfully flirt with her reflection, but was afraid to touch her fragile skin with fingers now coarse and worn.
Miss Lily’s bedroom window framed her body as she turned, around and around, on tiptoe like a ballerina in a music box. A newly born Narcissus on a pedestal, Miss Lily was absorbed in scrutiny and examination. Although the black night thrust licentiously against her closed windows, Miss Lily could not see out into the night. The stars blinked, unseen in the velvety sky, and the season’s last fireflies flashed invisibly in the dark. From an anonymous tree, an owl peered through the darkness, searching for his prey, and hooted mournfully in the midnight stillness. Night crawlers slithered through the field of wildflowers and poked their serpentine heads out from under the front porch. Moths with dusty wings flew kamikaze missions into the closed windows and fell with soft thuds onto the roof. The vine of a moonflower crept up the columns of the porch, and unfolded its petals, opening like a full-mouthed snowy kiss to the moon, and invited the thousand eyes of the night to the glowing house on the hill, to watch.
Her rouged lips parted slightly, like a small child’s in anticipation of a lollipop, forming a perfect “O.” A sea of first graders gazed in awe as Miss Lily drew circles on the chalkboard.
“Looonely,” said Miss Lily, reminding her students of the letters and sounds that they had learned in kindergarten, but had left behind in the languid summer days. “Moooan. Ooown. Can anyone tell me another word that has an ‘O’ sound in it?” She pursed her red lollipop lips into another circle.
Five fingers appeared sheepishly in the air from the back row.
“Yes, Michael?”
“Umm . . . nooo?”
The freckle on Miss Lily’s left cheek disappeared into a dimple as a smile blossomed across her face. “Yes! Very good. Any other ideas?”
The first graders fed off of Miss Lily’s enthusiasm, and were excited now too, spewing word confetti from jabbering mouths.
“Go!” “Home!” “Don’t!” “Show!”
Miss Lily drew the long, straight line of an “I” next to the white circles on the board.
“What about ‘I’ sounds? For example, spyyy. Miiine.”
“Bye!” “Cry!” “Die!” “Eye!”
It was only Miss Lily’s second week at Kidron Elementary School, but her students fawned over her already. They stared at her with wide, amorous eyes, absorbing her with a sycophantic gaze. At recess, the girls tried to braid her long, auburn hair while the boys tugged at her skirts for her attention.
From the hallway, through the window in the door, Principal Richard watched as first graders clambered from their miniature desks and rushed to the front of the room as Miss Lily announced the end of the day’s phonetics lesson. Groping at her feet and ankles, they encircled her, like bees on the open face of a sunflower or moths swarming around a candle at night. Crouching on their knees before her stool, the first graders looked on as Miss Lily cracked open Snow White and they clapped their hands and all chanted in unison when she got to the good parts.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . “
* * *
At lunch, Jan Donnelly, the school’s secretary, sought out Miss Lily in the library. She peaked her deflated puff hairdo out from behind the stack of Hardy Boy mysteries and Miss Lily nearly choked on her carrot in surprise. Jan was a purple nails and hair spray type, with a mouth as big as her fist that she always crammed full of tic-tacs and mentos. She hated children, but had adored Principal Richard since they graduated together thirteen years back; she kept her position as the elementary school’s secretary simply so she could watch which students’ mothers he kept suspiciously long in his locked, windowless office. She marked them down in a notebook that she kept in her desk drawer, under her mints.
“He likes you, ya know,” Jan announced, flopping into the chair opposite Miss Lily’s.
Miss Lily looked up bashfully, blushing. Jan forged on despite the rosy tint blooming on the young teacher’s cheek. Miss Lily huddled a little, feeling fragile.
“I’m not sure I understand. To whom are you referring?”
“Well, Dick, dummy,” snapped Jan. She puckered her glossed lips and violently sucked her mentos. “Principal Richard! You must have noticed the way he looks at you. He comes back to the office after hallway rounds drooling so much that I swear I’ll have to mop one of these days!”
Jan leaned forward on the table and her cleavage spilled out of her v-neck blouse. Miss Lily slumped and shifted uncomfortably under Jan’s covetous stare, and she averted her eyes, examining instead the collection of Berenstain Bears books.
Undeterred, Jan launched ahead, her lecherous eyes widening. “And whenever he gets back from staff meetings he locks himself in his office for, like, twenty minutes. And we all know what that means.” She snorted and kept on sucking.
Miss Lily wasn’t sure what to make of Jan’s assertive declaration, but she felt threatened by it, and crossed her legs and pulled her cardigan a bit tighter around her shoulders, instinctively covering her protruding collarbones and the tender skin at the nape of her neck.
Principal Richard, though barely thirty, hadn’t aged well. His facial fat puddled around his chin, and grizzly bushes of chest hair poked their frizzled heads out of the top button of his dress shirts. When he wore a tie, he used it solely to wipe his armpits of their forever expanding sweat stains.
“But I shouldn’t say that, it makes him sound perverse,” Jan continued, punctuating Miss Lily’s awkward silence. “He coaches youth softball and supports the booster club and all that. He’s harmless— he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Really. He stopped fishing the way normal folks do it because he hated skewering maggots and worms, and now he just fly fishes. Cuz they don’t use real flies, you know.”
Miss Lily didn’t know. She was preoccupied with the horrific image of Principal Richard’s characteristically sweaty personage guiding a young girl’s hand on a wooden bat, teaching her how to swing strong and hit the ball.
Jan extended her pudgy fingers and plucked a carrot from Miss Lily’s plate. Between crunches, she asked, “What’s a Saratoga city slicker doing in bumblefuck Kidron, Ohio anyhow? I mean, there’s nothing here except for two hardware stores and three Mennonite churches. Hell, if you want alcohol or sex or anything you have to go the whole way to Akron, or ravage the Amish kids on rumspringa, and that’s just a drag.”
Miss Lily sighed, and looked away ruefully. “Well, there was a small situation that I felt that I needed to get away from, and Kidron seemed like a nice place to escape and relax out of the public eye for a while.”
Jan pounced. “I bet it was a man, wasn’t it? Oh, this is good. I’ve heard about those big-time horse race gamblers up in Saratoga. They treat their women like their horses. If ya don’t put out, you’re out the door like a horse with a stitch in its calf on the backstretch. Yeah, this is real good stuff.”
Silently, Miss Lily moved on from her carrots to her celery. Jan looked beyond Miss Lily’s right ear as a stocky shadow darkened the doorway.
Leaping up from the table, Jan exclaimed, “Honey, now’s your chance!” She bounded to the young teacher’s side, and whispered in her ear: “The fastest way to his heart is jelly beans. I know it. I’ll tell him to give you a call tonight.” Miss Lily crumpled, like a morning glory at the approach of the noontime sun, folding its petals into itself. Then, leaving her half-finished lunch on the table and Jan amongst the National Geographics, Miss Lily pushed wordlessly past Principal Richard’s gut in the doorway and tumbled into the hallway, then fled to her classroom.
At the end of the school day, Miss Lily bustled out the door before the last echoes of the bell had dissipated, narrowly avoiding Principal Richard’s bug-eyed attempts to flag her down to invite her to that evening’s softball tournament game. She had grown accustomed to taking the two-mile journey home by foot, but now she regretted it. The walk took Miss Lily by the ballpark, down to the crossroads that served as the village square, and past the Town and Country store where crotchety old men sat gathering dust in rickety rocking chairs in the afternoons, smoking pipes, talking about the year’s corn harvest, and jeering at children as they walked home from school. The old men whooped and hollered at Miss Lily’s smooth, lean calves that peaked out from under her sundress as she scuttled past, but went back to grumbling about the uppity New Yawker once she had gone by. Miss Lily had paid a dying farmer an exorbitant sum for an old farmhouse at the top of Emerson Hill, and allowed prime soybean soil to degenerate into a field of wildflowers.
Beyond the farmhouse’s westward facing front porch, Kidron valley stretched out in a patchwork quilt of fields. On clear evenings, the crack of a bat punctuated the sticky early September air as little legs sprinted in diamonds to the cheers of parents and Principal Richard. But Miss Lily sat inside, where the air was still and damp, behind closed doors and thick window glass, and slowly took the phone off the hook. From the softball field, where Mr. Richard’s team jumped into each other’s arms and clapped hands, celebrating that evening’s victory, Miss Lily’s house could be seen, blazing in the already darkened Eastern sky, then suddenly, like a candle, the lights snuffed out.
* * *
When Miss Lily arrived at the school the next morning, she successfully snuck past the office, but found Jan lurking by her classroom door. She followed the young teacher into the empty classroom.
“I tried to call ya last night but the phone was busy for hours. Who were you talking to for so long, huh?” Jan didn’t skip a beat to wait for a response. “No doubt that New York man. Is he gonna come down here and try to find you or what? Don’t tell Dick about him, by the way. He’s a nice guy but he’s a bit of a jealous type and it’s the envious ones that make the most trouble.”
“There’s no New York man, Miss Donnelly.”
Jan’s nose scrunched up into her closely set eyes and her bottom lip sagged stupidly. She jutted out her chin, perplexed. Then, like a baby doll whose plastic eyelids open and close when you shake it, Jan’s eyes bulged suddenly.
“You cheated on him, didn’t you? And you’re escaping his horrific, erotic wrath! That’s obviously it. No one comes to Kidron because they actually like it here.” She snickered in the falsetto of a sixth grade boy who has just learned the word “fuck,” and giggled at her own risqué fantasy. She was lingering in the doorframe where the first graders had taped up fall leaf cutouts, and looked like a floozy in a toy store. Miss Lily was becoming nauseous with disdain, and slumped into her desk chair, feeling faint.
“You feelin’ alright honey? And what’s up with the snowsuit?” Jan breached the threshold of the doorway, penetrating into the classroom, and reached out to tug on the sleeve of Miss Lily’s modest sweater. “It’s hot as blazes in here! You’re going to melt like a popsicle on the sidewalk by lunch unless you strip that heavy thing off.”
“I think I’m getting sick. I woke up this morning with the chills, and I’m afraid it might be terribly contagious,” said Miss Lily meekly, and she feigned a delicate cough.
Jan scoffed but moved a step away. “I’ll get Dick to fix something up for you,” she insisted. “He’d just love to show his sympathetic side.” She slunk out of the classroom with a wink.
Halfway through math class, Jan’s animated face appeared in the window of the classroom door, and she knocked with the enthusiasm of a carpetbagger selling cosmetics in rich suburbs. Miss Lily begrudgingly opened the door, and Jan thrust in, a mug of tea in hand.
“From Dick,” she whispered in Miss Lily’s ear as she swept past, placing the steaming mug on her desk and producing honey packets from her pocket. “And he sent some cough drops too. You’re lucky to have a sweet guy like him after you.”
Miss Lily said nothing in response but ushered the secretary out the door, claiming the pressing importance of basic addition. She let the chamomile tea set until it was too cold to drink and gave out cough drops as prizes for correct math.
On her walk home that afternoon, the rusty men stationed outside Kidron Town & Country didn’t hoot at Miss Lily as she hurried past their chairs and into the store. She was looking wet from the humidity, dripping almost, and her shiny hair was deflated, and her wide legged pants hid her sculpted legs. They shook their heads and wagged their drooping chins and commiserated, “They must not have humidity up there in Sar’toga.” When Miss Lily emerged from the store a few minutes later with a full bolt of dark blue calico fabric, they wondered if a city girl would know how to sew.
* * *
When softball season ended, the panel of old men on Kidron Town & Country’s front porch noticed the abrupt absence of their favorite object of observation. Miss Lily had stopped walking to work, knowing that Principal Richard would no longer be occupied directly after school with little girls, bats, and balls, and the walk left her feeling exposed, vulnerable. Principal Richard’s team had cleaned up the tournament season victoriously, but Miss Lily hadn’t heard the cheers from the ballpark. Instead, she was holed up in her house, sewing dark blue curtains in the pantry, the only room that didn’t have windows. The farmhouse’s wide-eyed front windows stared vacantly into the sultry night, and inside, Miss Lily pricked her fingers on needles in the dark.
Below, in the valley, the ballpark’s lights flickered then went out, and in the sticky Indian summer night little girls were treated to post-game hot dogs. Miss Lily’s phone rang and rang after the victory, and her caller ID lit up with the elementary school’s office number. She called the phone company to have them disconnect her home phone, and waited on the line until she heard the dull beep of solitude.
Miss Lily searched for Principal Richard’s address in the staff directory, and wrote it on a slip of paper that she taped to her bathroom mirror, along with his phone number and email address and the names of his closest friends and family. She poured over maps of the little village, marking streets that the man would likely be on, and at what times. With operative diligence, Miss Lily shadowed Principal Richard’s routine, from his 6:45 cup of coffee and cinnamon toast at the downtown Bliss Café, to his afternoon pit stop at Kidron Town & Country to jabber with the men in their rocking chairs, and to the houses of his friends, where he played and lost at poker. On Tuesday, it was Doug’s, where the wife served chip dip and didn’t let them stay past ten-thirty. Thursday’s Bud Light and football explained the lack of Friday morning meetings. On Sundays, he fished. Miss Lily tracked his movements, and put ostensible stars on the map to demarcate his stomping ground.
When Miss Lily knocked on Jan’s door while Principal Richard was away at an administrative meeting, the secretary was delighted to usher her in. Autumn parent-teacher conferences were fast approaching, and Miss Lily had become morbidly obsessed with the contents of the notebook that Jan kept in her desk drawer. Miss Lily could no longer stand to look at her first graders without knowing which of their mothers had grasped the worn leatherette of Principal Richard’s belt, or burrowed their lips into his glutinous neck.
“Getting jealous, huh?” said Jan with a wink and a nudge.
Miss Lily flipped open the notebook, and read aloud with a trembling voice. “January 28th, meatball sub day, Ms. Hampshire (formerly Mrs. Withrich), suspicious scraping chairs sounds and a misplaced woman’s watch. April 17th, English as a Second Language testing, Miss Ruiz (mother of Amber Ruiz), candle-induced fire alarm, blamed on faulty microwave popcorn. June 3rd, Field Day, Mrs. Wilson (head of PTO Classroom Mothers Committee), missing order of popsicles, whipped cream, and waterslide lubricant.” Miss Lily flicked through the pages with the voracity of a teenage boy peeping at a stolen porn magazine in a gas station bathroom. She simply couldn’t stop reading. Jan looked on with pride, and her lips twisted into
a proprietary smirk.
* * *
When Miss Lily’s Honda pulled into Lehman’s Hardware’s parking lot across the square from Kidron Town & Country, the white heads nearly spilled out of their rocking chairs with surprise. For weeks, they had only seen her car zoom through the intersection and head up Emerson Hill even before the busses had come by. They missed her cleavage and sundresses and calves and small hands. Although the autumn weather was still warm, Miss Lily appeared wearing black dress pants and a turtleneck, and her hair was tied back in a bun. Bug-eyed sunglasses hid most of her face. Miss Lily emerged from the hardware staggering under the weight of a stack of square-cut mirrors, and drove off again, leaving the old men rocking and wondering and watching as her car snaked up Emerson Road to her house on the hill.
The hoary old men had been right—Miss Lily couldn’t sew. The unfinished curtains lay crumpled in a pile in the pantry, where she had sat for nights on end, bleeding on the fabric as she clumsily attempted to make neat stitches in the calico. Miss Lily was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the pantry amongst her dwindling supply of canned vegetables and now nearly empty stock of fresh fruit. If she couldn’t block out the penetrating night and its peering eyes, she need some way to ensure her security within her own house. Miss Lily banished dark alcoves and blind corners, and set up mirrors to illuminate every nook. While standing at the sink, she could now see into the shower, and from the kitchen table she had a view of the back porch. She lined the baseboard of her bedroom with mirrors, so she could chase monsters out from under her bed without even having to get down on her knees.
With a simple trick of light, Miss Lily was replicated a hundred times over. She caught a glimpse of her facial profile while turning a corner, and her own reflection followed her up the stairs to her bedroom. In this new house of mirrors, she was fascinated by curves of her body that she had never seen before. Pulling off her turtleneck, Miss Lily found an indentation in the small of her back, where her spine met her slender hips. Undressing in the mirror, she examined her hamstrings, the backs of her kneecaps, the curvature of her neck. Miss Lily wondered at the translucency of her skin, now pale and powdery, ashen from the abrupt lack of exposure to sunlight. Her limbs, once lean, were now skeletal, and her elbows jutted out at broken angles. Miss Lily pursed her unglossed lips, and watched herself unsuccessfully flirt with her reflection, but was afraid to touch her fragile skin with fingers now coarse and worn.
Miss Lily’s bedroom window framed her body as she turned, around and around, on tiptoe like a ballerina in a music box. A newly born Narcissus on a pedestal, Miss Lily was absorbed in scrutiny and examination. Although the black night thrust licentiously against her closed windows, Miss Lily could not see out into the night. The stars blinked, unseen in the velvety sky, and the season’s last fireflies flashed invisibly in the dark. From an anonymous tree, an owl peered through the darkness, searching for his prey, and hooted mournfully in the midnight stillness. Night crawlers slithered through the field of wildflowers and poked their serpentine heads out from under the front porch. Moths with dusty wings flew kamikaze missions into the closed windows and fell with soft thuds onto the roof. The vine of a moonflower crept up the columns of the porch, and unfolded its petals, opening like a full-mouthed snowy kiss to the moon, and invited the thousand eyes of the night to the glowing house on the hill, to watch.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Note to the House-Sitter
14 March 2010
Sunday
Maria:
Please do not make yourself comfortable. Or if you do, I would ask that you re-fluff the pillows upon leaving the couch. The muslin cotton throw pillows sit at a 60 degree angle to each arm of the couch and the slightly smaller yellow ones rest on top of that, at a pleasantly skewed angle that appears both spontaneous and aesthetic. Symmetry is imperative. You will find a protractor in the top drawer of the bureau in the dining room, next to the tubes of Tide-to-Go. Both can be used accordingly, although I would prefer that the occasion not arise where their utilization should become necessary.
I suppose you can eat, provided that you do the dishes. I’m sorry, but you will have to wash them by hand. I disposed of my last dishwasher because it continually left streaks on my glasses and plates, despite the overzealous promises of detergent commercials. I keep latex gloves under the sink. Please discard them after every use. If you must cook, I would ask that you promptly and thoroughly throw out all leftovers in the garbage disposal; eight-legged armies are attracted to the stench of decomposing food like warriors to the scent of blood. If a spider should appear in my kitchen or elsewhere, kill it immediately. Have no compassion for God’s mutant bastard child. The little beasty must and will die. And do not dare to drink alcohol in or around my house.
I understand that you will be busy attending class during the day, but there are a few chores that I would like you take care of around the house. It is absolutely necessary that you water my hyacinths. I will be showing them in a few weeks as an example of winter bulb forcing at the Spring Flora Expo, and I want to take any and all precautions. If my reputation should deteriorate among the Ohio Creative Design community, my freelance flower arrangement business will be irrevocably damaged. Please understand the gravity of this situation. Maria, I am counting on you. The temperature in the back sewing room must not exceed 55 degrees—leave the door closed at all times to prevent heat from the house from entering. The pots should be rotated 180 degrees every two days, to ensure a straight stem. Leave the pots on the sewing table, in indirect sunlight. On Tuesday, add one tablespoon of half-strength household plant fertilizer to each pot. The fertilizer can be found under the bathroom sink, with the OxyClean and Peroxide and Ammonia.
In addition to the upkeep of my hyacinths, and any other small household tasks that you should find necessary in order to keep the house in the state in which you found it, there are one or two small errands that I would like for you to complete throughout the week. My dry cleaning should be ready on Wednesday evening. If you receive a somewhat indiscernible phone message from a man with a thick Indian accent, it is more than likely Mr. Arundhati, calling to tell me that my clothes are done. If he asks about the stain on my bathrobe, tell him it was wine. Also, garbage collection day is Thursday. If at all possible, keep watch for the garbage truck, and bring in my trashcans immediately after they are emptied. The Johnson boys have a tendency to steal them, fill them with bricks and/or dog shit, or light their contents on fire.
While on the subject of the small devils that live next door, I should warn you of a few things (besides incinerated trash). The Middleburgh Intermediate School bus arrives at approximately 3:04 on Monday–Thursday, and tends to be delayed slightly on Fridays. Once the two twats get home, their negligible mother gives them sugar and casts them out to the backyard, where they yell and scream and hammer things and generally make a childish ruckus. If they should shout unpleasant things over the fence (ie: “hag,” “fag,” or other rhyming words), ignore it. Do not egg them on, and do not appease them. If they throw baseballs at the birdbath or the gnomes in the backyard, do not throw them back.
I’m afraid my humble abode doesn’t offer much entertainment. The collection of leather-bound 19th century novels in the salon is not for reading, it is for display. I dust their jackets weekly, usually on Wednesday. The books for actual consumption are kept in my bedroom, in alphabetical order on my bookcase. Although my DVD collection is significantly smaller, I would ask that you likewise maintain its organization. You will not find embarrassing home videos, or sex tapes, or boxes of love letters, or filing cabinets of classified family secrets. If you are looking for voyeuristic amusement, you will find none. I can, however, offer you free access to an extensive hoard of Julie Andrews movies and a complete collection of Jane Austin novels.
On Friday evening/Saturday morning, at between 1:55 and 2:05 A.M., you will receive a distraught call from a man named Jimmy. If it is not too much to ask, please make arrangements to pick him up at O’Neill’s pub on Republic Ave. Deposit my wayward brother at his tenant on 186 Montgomery St. and please verify that he has his keys. It’s just a short 5-mile drive, and he shouldn’t be too bothersome. Ignore the stench of cheap Merlot—there is Lysol in the glove compartment. If he tries to bring a cup or a bottle into the car, I absolutely forbid it after last weekend’s spill. If he notices that you are not me (a detail which he very well may not discern), do not tell him where I am. Inform him that I will be back next week, and remind him that he owes me $120 for upholstery cleaning. If you should feel uncomfortable with this request, I have also left the number for the taxi service on the counter. Call around midnight on Friday night, and give them the same instructions as I have detailed here.
I have left my contact information on the counter. As I will be running around all week finalizing decorative and floral arrangements for Alie’s wedding, my cell phone is the best bet. If need be, you can also contact the hotel and leave a message for the Miller wedding party. I will be back from D.C. late Sunday evening, the 21st of March. In preparation for my return, please strip the sheets from the guest bed and change the towels in the bathroom. Fresh sheets and towels can be found in the upstairs hallway linen closet. Travelling fries my nerves, and there is nothing more soothing than a tidy house.
Maria, I thank you genuinely for your help. I am thoroughly excited to see my baby sister get married, and your generosity and diligence make it possible. Just please do not neglect the hyacinths.
Best regards,
Helen Miller
Sunday
Maria:
Please do not make yourself comfortable. Or if you do, I would ask that you re-fluff the pillows upon leaving the couch. The muslin cotton throw pillows sit at a 60 degree angle to each arm of the couch and the slightly smaller yellow ones rest on top of that, at a pleasantly skewed angle that appears both spontaneous and aesthetic. Symmetry is imperative. You will find a protractor in the top drawer of the bureau in the dining room, next to the tubes of Tide-to-Go. Both can be used accordingly, although I would prefer that the occasion not arise where their utilization should become necessary.
I suppose you can eat, provided that you do the dishes. I’m sorry, but you will have to wash them by hand. I disposed of my last dishwasher because it continually left streaks on my glasses and plates, despite the overzealous promises of detergent commercials. I keep latex gloves under the sink. Please discard them after every use. If you must cook, I would ask that you promptly and thoroughly throw out all leftovers in the garbage disposal; eight-legged armies are attracted to the stench of decomposing food like warriors to the scent of blood. If a spider should appear in my kitchen or elsewhere, kill it immediately. Have no compassion for God’s mutant bastard child. The little beasty must and will die. And do not dare to drink alcohol in or around my house.
I understand that you will be busy attending class during the day, but there are a few chores that I would like you take care of around the house. It is absolutely necessary that you water my hyacinths. I will be showing them in a few weeks as an example of winter bulb forcing at the Spring Flora Expo, and I want to take any and all precautions. If my reputation should deteriorate among the Ohio Creative Design community, my freelance flower arrangement business will be irrevocably damaged. Please understand the gravity of this situation. Maria, I am counting on you. The temperature in the back sewing room must not exceed 55 degrees—leave the door closed at all times to prevent heat from the house from entering. The pots should be rotated 180 degrees every two days, to ensure a straight stem. Leave the pots on the sewing table, in indirect sunlight. On Tuesday, add one tablespoon of half-strength household plant fertilizer to each pot. The fertilizer can be found under the bathroom sink, with the OxyClean and Peroxide and Ammonia.
In addition to the upkeep of my hyacinths, and any other small household tasks that you should find necessary in order to keep the house in the state in which you found it, there are one or two small errands that I would like for you to complete throughout the week. My dry cleaning should be ready on Wednesday evening. If you receive a somewhat indiscernible phone message from a man with a thick Indian accent, it is more than likely Mr. Arundhati, calling to tell me that my clothes are done. If he asks about the stain on my bathrobe, tell him it was wine. Also, garbage collection day is Thursday. If at all possible, keep watch for the garbage truck, and bring in my trashcans immediately after they are emptied. The Johnson boys have a tendency to steal them, fill them with bricks and/or dog shit, or light their contents on fire.
While on the subject of the small devils that live next door, I should warn you of a few things (besides incinerated trash). The Middleburgh Intermediate School bus arrives at approximately 3:04 on Monday–Thursday, and tends to be delayed slightly on Fridays. Once the two twats get home, their negligible mother gives them sugar and casts them out to the backyard, where they yell and scream and hammer things and generally make a childish ruckus. If they should shout unpleasant things over the fence (ie: “hag,” “fag,” or other rhyming words), ignore it. Do not egg them on, and do not appease them. If they throw baseballs at the birdbath or the gnomes in the backyard, do not throw them back.
I’m afraid my humble abode doesn’t offer much entertainment. The collection of leather-bound 19th century novels in the salon is not for reading, it is for display. I dust their jackets weekly, usually on Wednesday. The books for actual consumption are kept in my bedroom, in alphabetical order on my bookcase. Although my DVD collection is significantly smaller, I would ask that you likewise maintain its organization. You will not find embarrassing home videos, or sex tapes, or boxes of love letters, or filing cabinets of classified family secrets. If you are looking for voyeuristic amusement, you will find none. I can, however, offer you free access to an extensive hoard of Julie Andrews movies and a complete collection of Jane Austin novels.
On Friday evening/Saturday morning, at between 1:55 and 2:05 A.M., you will receive a distraught call from a man named Jimmy. If it is not too much to ask, please make arrangements to pick him up at O’Neill’s pub on Republic Ave. Deposit my wayward brother at his tenant on 186 Montgomery St. and please verify that he has his keys. It’s just a short 5-mile drive, and he shouldn’t be too bothersome. Ignore the stench of cheap Merlot—there is Lysol in the glove compartment. If he tries to bring a cup or a bottle into the car, I absolutely forbid it after last weekend’s spill. If he notices that you are not me (a detail which he very well may not discern), do not tell him where I am. Inform him that I will be back next week, and remind him that he owes me $120 for upholstery cleaning. If you should feel uncomfortable with this request, I have also left the number for the taxi service on the counter. Call around midnight on Friday night, and give them the same instructions as I have detailed here.
I have left my contact information on the counter. As I will be running around all week finalizing decorative and floral arrangements for Alie’s wedding, my cell phone is the best bet. If need be, you can also contact the hotel and leave a message for the Miller wedding party. I will be back from D.C. late Sunday evening, the 21st of March. In preparation for my return, please strip the sheets from the guest bed and change the towels in the bathroom. Fresh sheets and towels can be found in the upstairs hallway linen closet. Travelling fries my nerves, and there is nothing more soothing than a tidy house.
Maria, I thank you genuinely for your help. I am thoroughly excited to see my baby sister get married, and your generosity and diligence make it possible. Just please do not neglect the hyacinths.
Best regards,
Helen Miller
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Vivisection
I have sprouted glassy feathers, and someone is plucking them out of my left arm, one by one. This must be what a duck feels like at the butcher, bound up, strapped down, stripped naked, and shivering. Although I always assumed they were dead beforehand. Why am I not dead yet?
She is coming at me with forceps, and when the blunt tips press into my flesh, I become acutely aware that I cannot move my arms. Coarse fabric digs grooves into my ankles and wrists. My shoes have been removed. I can see my toes, my feet; they are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius, and my palms face the ceiling. Someone has slit my shirt down the center and it is stripped away from my chest, spread out to my sides like delicately removed skin from a corpse on an autopsy table.
This is not butchery; this is vivisection.
My skull throbs and pulses and I blink my eyes in the fluorescent light, running in parallel lines above my immobile head. When Jeanne took me to the Anatomy Amphitheater at the university medical center on Wednesday to practice for her presentation, I joked with her and lay down spread-eagle on the surgical table on stage. Far above, flies ingloriously committed suicide, flying kamikaze missions into the buzzing fluorescent lights. She yelled at me and told me not to ridicule the medical profession.
“It’ll save your life one day, you know!”
Jeanne was always chastising me—for my crooked tie, for my liquored breath, for my mussed hair, for my unpolished shoes. Even so, she wanted me to come to her dissertation presentation. I promised I’d sit in the back and not make a fuss. But I wanted to touch the table where the bodies lay.
I didn’t want to be the body.
I force my eyes open and widen my mouth into the perfect oval for a blood-curdling scream. I’m not dead yet! But stiff pads press into my temples and I cannot tilt my head back. No oxygen reaches my lungs. The woman in white is still depluming me.
The straps around my wrists tighten as I tense my muscles and try to move them, and the woman looks up, startled. She wipes her white smock with pudgy fingers and stares at me with terrified green eyes from under wisps of ginger hair.
“You’re . . . awake! They said you were unconscious and it’s just a short drive and, and . . . uh, what’s your name, sir?”
She sets her forceps down with a clank and loses her balance. The table lurches and my weight shifts painfully onto my left side. The tubes attached to my arms are swinging rhythmically; I realize that I am moving. We have just turned a corner. A siren is whining in my ears, ringing, exhausted.
“Will I be late?” I croak. Moving my tongue to speak I notice that my teeth are warm and sticky. There is a hole where my
front tooth goes. Wincing, I bare my sanguine grin.
“We’ll be there soon, don’t worry.” She tells me I’ll be alright, but her tone is unconvincing. She scuttles about my horizontal body with her tools. From her deep pocket she produces gauze, and attacks my forehead with a wet rag and peroxide.
“What’s your name?” the woman in white wants to know. “Can you tell me who you are? Do you know how you got here?”
When I don’t answer, she tells me an elaborate tale about rainclouds and puddles, skidding and brake lights, windshields and steering wheels. The details tumble hurriedly from her mouth and plop like raindrops somewhere beyond my consciousness, sending ripples through my nerves as she swabs my forehead with alcohol. She dictates like a police report, without adjectives, without feeling, although her eyes widen as she speaks, as though she is frightened by the very story she is reciting. An eastbound, silver Honda CRV skidded through a red light on icy pavement and broadsided a maroon ’98 Volvo heading northbound on Westchester Avenue at approximately 10:10 Friday morning. The driver of the Volvo was rendered unconscious upon impact. Significant bodily damage was inflicted upon both vehicle and operator.
I have a Volvo. My uncle lent it to me after I maneuvered my Nissan into a ditch after a particularly heavy Saturday night out. He never liked the color of that old car.
“Do you know where you are?” asks the woman.
I am not in my Volvo. My Volvo’s plush upholstery smells stale like cigarettes and its wide backseat smells sweaty like sex, not sterile like bleach and steel. I keep condoms and registration and a map of the Midwest in my glove compartment, not tubes and forceps.
The woman in white is leaning over me, pulling open my eyelids. I am briefly blinded; she must be searching in my brain for something. I wonder what she sees.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I will not be on time for Jeanne’s dissertation presentation. It starts at 11.
“Will I be late?” I ask again. My words are slurring but I can’t help it. My lips won’t open fully, my teeth aren’t set straight. My tongue lags behind in the back of my throat, and I fear I might vomit on the woman in white.
Jeanne will assume that I had been drunk, that I’d gone overboard on a Thursday night again, that I hadn’t woken up to my alarm. But I wasn’t. Not this time. I swear.
“Will I be late?”
My body lurches to the right, and the woman in white nearly tumbles on top of me. She is shaking my shoulder, harder than I suppose she should.
“What’s your name? Stay with me, honey, I want you to tell me your name!”
I want to be Jeanne, but I am not. I press my eyelids shut again. They are sticky and cool as they sweep up and down over my swelling eyeballs. My contracting esophagus compels me gag, to expel from my stomach this morning’s breakfast, last night’s nightcap, yesterday evening’s dinner. I want to rid my body of its contents, of its toxins and alcohol and cigarette smoke. My lips sag open and spittle collects on the corners of my mouth like unused excuses.
“Will I be late?”
When I lie, feet out, palms up, spread-eagle under Jeanne’s penetrating gaze, I want her to find me clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when she approaches me with forceps and scalpel and pins.
She is coming at me with forceps, and when the blunt tips press into my flesh, I become acutely aware that I cannot move my arms. Coarse fabric digs grooves into my ankles and wrists. My shoes have been removed. I can see my toes, my feet; they are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius, and my palms face the ceiling. Someone has slit my shirt down the center and it is stripped away from my chest, spread out to my sides like delicately removed skin from a corpse on an autopsy table.
This is not butchery; this is vivisection.
My skull throbs and pulses and I blink my eyes in the fluorescent light, running in parallel lines above my immobile head. When Jeanne took me to the Anatomy Amphitheater at the university medical center on Wednesday to practice for her presentation, I joked with her and lay down spread-eagle on the surgical table on stage. Far above, flies ingloriously committed suicide, flying kamikaze missions into the buzzing fluorescent lights. She yelled at me and told me not to ridicule the medical profession.
“It’ll save your life one day, you know!”
Jeanne was always chastising me—for my crooked tie, for my liquored breath, for my mussed hair, for my unpolished shoes. Even so, she wanted me to come to her dissertation presentation. I promised I’d sit in the back and not make a fuss. But I wanted to touch the table where the bodies lay.
I didn’t want to be the body.
I force my eyes open and widen my mouth into the perfect oval for a blood-curdling scream. I’m not dead yet! But stiff pads press into my temples and I cannot tilt my head back. No oxygen reaches my lungs. The woman in white is still depluming me.
The straps around my wrists tighten as I tense my muscles and try to move them, and the woman looks up, startled. She wipes her white smock with pudgy fingers and stares at me with terrified green eyes from under wisps of ginger hair.
“You’re . . . awake! They said you were unconscious and it’s just a short drive and, and . . . uh, what’s your name, sir?”
She sets her forceps down with a clank and loses her balance. The table lurches and my weight shifts painfully onto my left side. The tubes attached to my arms are swinging rhythmically; I realize that I am moving. We have just turned a corner. A siren is whining in my ears, ringing, exhausted.
“Will I be late?” I croak. Moving my tongue to speak I notice that my teeth are warm and sticky. There is a hole where my
front tooth goes. Wincing, I bare my sanguine grin.
“We’ll be there soon, don’t worry.” She tells me I’ll be alright, but her tone is unconvincing. She scuttles about my horizontal body with her tools. From her deep pocket she produces gauze, and attacks my forehead with a wet rag and peroxide.
“What’s your name?” the woman in white wants to know. “Can you tell me who you are? Do you know how you got here?”
When I don’t answer, she tells me an elaborate tale about rainclouds and puddles, skidding and brake lights, windshields and steering wheels. The details tumble hurriedly from her mouth and plop like raindrops somewhere beyond my consciousness, sending ripples through my nerves as she swabs my forehead with alcohol. She dictates like a police report, without adjectives, without feeling, although her eyes widen as she speaks, as though she is frightened by the very story she is reciting. An eastbound, silver Honda CRV skidded through a red light on icy pavement and broadsided a maroon ’98 Volvo heading northbound on Westchester Avenue at approximately 10:10 Friday morning. The driver of the Volvo was rendered unconscious upon impact. Significant bodily damage was inflicted upon both vehicle and operator.
I have a Volvo. My uncle lent it to me after I maneuvered my Nissan into a ditch after a particularly heavy Saturday night out. He never liked the color of that old car.
“Do you know where you are?” asks the woman.
I am not in my Volvo. My Volvo’s plush upholstery smells stale like cigarettes and its wide backseat smells sweaty like sex, not sterile like bleach and steel. I keep condoms and registration and a map of the Midwest in my glove compartment, not tubes and forceps.
The woman in white is leaning over me, pulling open my eyelids. I am briefly blinded; she must be searching in my brain for something. I wonder what she sees.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I will not be on time for Jeanne’s dissertation presentation. It starts at 11.
“Will I be late?” I ask again. My words are slurring but I can’t help it. My lips won’t open fully, my teeth aren’t set straight. My tongue lags behind in the back of my throat, and I fear I might vomit on the woman in white.
Jeanne will assume that I had been drunk, that I’d gone overboard on a Thursday night again, that I hadn’t woken up to my alarm. But I wasn’t. Not this time. I swear.
“Will I be late?”
My body lurches to the right, and the woman in white nearly tumbles on top of me. She is shaking my shoulder, harder than I suppose she should.
“What’s your name? Stay with me, honey, I want you to tell me your name!”
I want to be Jeanne, but I am not. I press my eyelids shut again. They are sticky and cool as they sweep up and down over my swelling eyeballs. My contracting esophagus compels me gag, to expel from my stomach this morning’s breakfast, last night’s nightcap, yesterday evening’s dinner. I want to rid my body of its contents, of its toxins and alcohol and cigarette smoke. My lips sag open and spittle collects on the corners of my mouth like unused excuses.
“Will I be late?”
When I lie, feet out, palms up, spread-eagle under Jeanne’s penetrating gaze, I want her to find me clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when she approaches me with forceps and scalpel and pins.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Helium
Peter’s red balloon had stopped to chat with the whispering leaves of the poplar tree before floating away in pursuit of the soft September afternoon sunshine, its yellow ribbon trailing lackadaisically behind. Earth-bound Peter looked to the sky in lamentation, and tugged on his father’s flannel shirtsleeves. Jack Hamelin was tall, and Peter was convinced that if his father stood up and stretched out, he could retrieve the red balloon that was shrinking into a speck in the sky. Peter was afraid it might disappear entirely into the clouds if his father didn’t reach out soon and seize the yellow ribbon that was trembling in the breeze as though afraid of heights.
“Peter,” said Jack, not looking up, not looking down. “I need to explain something to you, and it might be difficult to understand right now.”
The yellow ribbon had gotten tangled with a curious raven, and briefly bobbed, suspended in blue. Peter leaned back on the park bench where they were sitting, engrossed by the action above.
“Your mother and I,” Jack continued, “we’ve been going through a lot of rough patches lately.”
The raven flapped away, squawking nevermore, and the red balloon resumed its path to the sun. Peter swung his legs from the bench, his Converse brushing the tips of the grass and sending feathery bursts of dandelion seeds into the air.
“I know things haven’t been the best at home these last few months—it’s not fair to you, Peter.”
Fair. Fairness was the virtue of the month for September in Peter’s kindergarten class—after August’s Truth but before October’s Compassion.
“In a few weeks, your mother and I are not going to be living together anymore.”
The red balloon vanished entirely behind Jack’s left ear.
“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
Peter contemplated the now empty sky and rearranged the syllables of this new foreign word in his mouth. It had taken Peter longer to learn how to read than his peers; while they grappled cardboard books with sticky fingers he constructed words out of building blocks with letters and sounds painted on the front. He put the sounds of the word “divorce” together and took them back apart again. Die-verse like awful rhymes in a poem about death. Divers like in the summer Olympics, leaping from high platforms into the watery abyss below. Da Force like Yoda used in Star Wars to make his enemies tremble with fear. The syllables of the word tumbled senselessly on his tongue.
When Jack looked down at Peter, the boy had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Jack briefly thought that his son had actually understood what he had been told, and he gathered the little boy into an embrace. Peter snuggled his nose into flannel and smoke.
When he looked up from his father’s grasp, Peter’s forehead was scrunched in contemplation. His mouth opened into the prefatory grimace that precedes the inarticulate questions that formulate in children’s minds. His lips pulled apart, exposing two gaping holes where teeth should have been.
“Where do lost balloons go when they float away? Do they ever come back?” Peter asked his father.
Jack looked down at his son’s watery eyes, pleading for comfort in the only way a five-year-old knows how. “Lost balloons carry dreams to little boys at night,” he responded, and Peter wondered what red dreams looked like.
“Would you like some ice cream?” asked Jack, consoling his son in the only way a thirty-two year old man who had never intended to have children knows how. He even let his son splurge with a chocolate-dipped waffle cone, and Da Force drifted from Peter’s mind and joined the ranks of the red balloon amongst the gathering clouds.
“Superman with SPRINKLES!” announced Peter proudly to the aproned ice cream man, and pointed eagerly to the waffle cone in the window. He took a wide lick and stuck out his tongue to show his father the melting rainbow in his mouth.
By the time Peter had devoured his ice cream, sprinkles, and cone and all, he wanted to know what Da Force was.
Jack hesitated. “Well, when two people love each other very much, they decide to spend their lives together, and they get married.”
It was mostly true—Jack remembered loving Hannah. In high school she had kept printed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in her locker and kept her mousy brown hair cropped close to her head. Regardless, she was elected May Queen in the spring of her senior year, and her slender, boyish hips and hollow cheeks photographed well. She spoke about gender equality in her speeches, and Jack found her naïve feminism endearing and strangely erotic. Jack did not share the same fiery activism as his wife; he was simple, but sincere, and the unattainable feminist found him charming. Hannah didn’t believe in marriage, but the two fell sloppily in love when they both turned twenty-one, and married the year after.
“But then, sometimes, two people grow up and grow apart,” continued Jack, struggling with the concept and the wording.
While Hannah had completed a master’s degree in Social Work and went on to rescue little girls from abusive parents, Jack stayed home and raised Peter. Although the East Side of Cleveland kept Hannah busy with humanitarian work, the deteriorating city was not big enough to accommodate yet another enthusiastic but mediocre musician. Jack had dreamed of being a drummer, and although he thrived in the classroom and in the quiet, secure studio, he lingered on the periphery of the self-destructive lifestyle of his more liberal peers at Oberlin. He brought them water backstage when his classmates’ bands toured northern Ohio, and picked up broken drumsticks, and repaired frayed cables. When his friends skipped class to arrange chaos in parallel lines, snorting white through Washington and dousing their artistic fervor with wine, Jack would lend them his carefully scribed lecture notes. Having smothered his own musical passion in college, Jack gave up and instead trained to be a fireman, extinguishing other people’s fires.
“Then two people who were once happy together begin to fight a lot, and sometimes they just can’t work it out. And at this point they decide it might be best to separate,” explained Jack.
Separate. Like corn from mashed potatoes. Or lips, and fingers, and legs. And boys and girls bathrooms.
“And although they used to care very much about each other, they let their love go, and it just . . . drifts away.”
Peter wasn’t sure what love looked like, but if it were anything like helium, it would float away like an unattended balloon and make your voice squeak when you suck it in. But everything comes back eventually—dogs that run away, boomerangs, mosquito bites, letters to the North Pole, and even lost balloons. Da Force didn’t seem so bad.
That night, Hannah came home late from taking care of other people’s troubled children, and while they waited for her, Jack and Peter sat on the floor of the living room listening to old vinyl records and drumming on the carpet. Despite his own abandoned attempts at musical eminence, Jack still harbored a secret desire that his son, although not terribly bright at schoolwork, could be instructed in classic rock. While Peter pounded the floor with unintentional syncopation and wailed like Robert Plant, Jack glossed the greats—The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix—referring to them by their surnames only like old friends, the kind you’d call up and invite for dinner. Peter liked Ringo’s beats the best since they were easy to follow, and he always requested that his father put on The Beatles first. They made it through the 1960s and had moved into the early 70s before Hannah arrived home. Hendrix was unexpectedly suffocated by her furrowed brows, and the house fell silent and still.
At the dinner table, Peter sat between Hannah and Jack, and watched the tennis match of growing resentment between his parents. He observed in subsequence his mother’s slicked back bun and his father’s wavy layers, her gin and his cognac, her tightly drawn lips and his scornfully squinted eyes, her calculated bites and his hungry mouthfuls. Hannah had made Peter’s favorite meal: barbequed pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and fresh strawberries on the side. But the beans were runny tonight, too hastily made, oozing across his plate until the strawberries were puddled in sauce, and seeping into the corner of the sesame seed bun. Peter tried to build a wall out of his knife and spoon to keep them separate.
Like boys and girls. Mothers and fathers.
When Peter pushed away his plate having barely touched the baked beans, Hannah grew suspicious.
“Not hungry, Petey?” asked his mother, thinly veiling sharp agitation with the soft professional tone she used with her clients.
“Daddy let me get a chocolate dipped waffle cone AND sprinkles at the park today after school! And a red balloon but it floated away. . .” Peter stuck out his tongue again, hoping the rainbow was still there to show his mother. She told him to close his mouth, and turned violently to Jack.
“Ice cream, eh? Are you trying to bribe him? Get him on your side?”
“Me? Strawberries aren’t even in season, Hannah. And you don’t eat pork!”
Peter had been enjoying Da Force until his mother abruptly ordered him away from the table to take a bath and go to bed. When he protested, Jack fee fi fo fumed him, telling him that the giant at the top of the beanstalk would smell him out and turn him into a soup unless he was squeaky clean. Peter sulked upstairs.
When Jack still hadn’t come into Peter’s bedroom to read him a story two hours later, Peter decided it must have been the bubble castle he left popping in the bathtub. His mother especially hated when he did that; she would stoop to her knees on the tile and attack the tub with yellow-gloved hands and mumble angry interjections about rings and porcelain under her breath.
Peter lay on top of his blankets, watching the spider that had been slowly making its way across his ceiling navigate the canyon between two tiles. He waited for his purple raisin skin to unwrinkle and waited for his father to appear at his door, with the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales they had been devouring one by one for months despite Hannah’s disapproval. Secretly, the stories frightened Peter, although he liked the cadence of his father’s voice and the whisper of a page turning. Tonight, Jack had promised his son the tale of the Pied Piper, but he never came. Da Force had lured Peter with promises and ice cream and walks in the park, but led him to naught but lukewarm bathwater and bedtimes without stories.
From downstairs, Peter could hear the gruff sound of his father’s reading voice—the one he reserved for the villains’ lines or bits about monsters—although it was faster now, louder, more syncopated, echoing up the stairs and bounding into Peter’s open bedroom door. Hannah’s harsh tongue chased Jack’s fiendish words with a whip and a tongue-lashing. She rebuked Jack’s retaliation with the same sharp, reproachful tone she used when Peter pinched her in the car or when he asked her embarrassing questions about body parts in public.
“You’re a fucking selfish feminist poser!” snarled Jack.
Barbequed pulled pork sounds squelched against the wall.
“And you’re a child playing fireman!” accused Hannah.
Something crashed.
The sound of Hannah’s heels on the kitchen floor was riveting. It moved from left to right beneath Peter’s head, cyclically, backwards and forwards like Zeppelin records on his father’s turnstile.
Peter was dozing off to the escalating sound of the grim drama downstairs, but he was afraid to fall asleep. Usually, his mother would come in and flatten his tousled hair, wavy like his father’s, kiss him good night, and wish him sweet dreams before switching off the light. Lying awake in the buzzing fluorescent glow of his overhead light, Jack was afraid the sweet dreams wouldn’t come.
Since it seemed as though his mother wouldn’t be coming up to tuck him into bed, Peter resolved to call for his dreams himself. He would be a big boy, taking charge. Peter made a clearing in the Star Wars action figures that were arranged on his dresser, and clambered up the knobs on the drawers and sat among them, a pajama-clad Gulliver amongst miniature ewoks and storm troopers. He leaned out the open window, stretching his head far into the darkness, leaving his decapitated body stretched out precariously on the sill. Satellites and airplanes and constellations above were confused for wandering balloons, scouring the neighborhood roofs below, searching for little boys waiting for dreams. Cicadas hummed in the trees, their songs shrill with helium. Peter waited for the yellow ribbon tail of his red balloon to stretch across the night sky, but this time he would leap out and snag it, although his father had failed to do so earlier. Peter wasn’t afraid of heights like the quivering yellow ribbon seemed to be. He just wasn’t sure if he had enough love in him to be able to float.
“Peter,” said Jack, not looking up, not looking down. “I need to explain something to you, and it might be difficult to understand right now.”
The yellow ribbon had gotten tangled with a curious raven, and briefly bobbed, suspended in blue. Peter leaned back on the park bench where they were sitting, engrossed by the action above.
“Your mother and I,” Jack continued, “we’ve been going through a lot of rough patches lately.”
The raven flapped away, squawking nevermore, and the red balloon resumed its path to the sun. Peter swung his legs from the bench, his Converse brushing the tips of the grass and sending feathery bursts of dandelion seeds into the air.
“I know things haven’t been the best at home these last few months—it’s not fair to you, Peter.”
Fair. Fairness was the virtue of the month for September in Peter’s kindergarten class—after August’s Truth but before October’s Compassion.
“In a few weeks, your mother and I are not going to be living together anymore.”
The red balloon vanished entirely behind Jack’s left ear.
“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
Peter contemplated the now empty sky and rearranged the syllables of this new foreign word in his mouth. It had taken Peter longer to learn how to read than his peers; while they grappled cardboard books with sticky fingers he constructed words out of building blocks with letters and sounds painted on the front. He put the sounds of the word “divorce” together and took them back apart again. Die-verse like awful rhymes in a poem about death. Divers like in the summer Olympics, leaping from high platforms into the watery abyss below. Da Force like Yoda used in Star Wars to make his enemies tremble with fear. The syllables of the word tumbled senselessly on his tongue.
When Jack looked down at Peter, the boy had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Jack briefly thought that his son had actually understood what he had been told, and he gathered the little boy into an embrace. Peter snuggled his nose into flannel and smoke.
When he looked up from his father’s grasp, Peter’s forehead was scrunched in contemplation. His mouth opened into the prefatory grimace that precedes the inarticulate questions that formulate in children’s minds. His lips pulled apart, exposing two gaping holes where teeth should have been.
“Where do lost balloons go when they float away? Do they ever come back?” Peter asked his father.
Jack looked down at his son’s watery eyes, pleading for comfort in the only way a five-year-old knows how. “Lost balloons carry dreams to little boys at night,” he responded, and Peter wondered what red dreams looked like.
“Would you like some ice cream?” asked Jack, consoling his son in the only way a thirty-two year old man who had never intended to have children knows how. He even let his son splurge with a chocolate-dipped waffle cone, and Da Force drifted from Peter’s mind and joined the ranks of the red balloon amongst the gathering clouds.
“Superman with SPRINKLES!” announced Peter proudly to the aproned ice cream man, and pointed eagerly to the waffle cone in the window. He took a wide lick and stuck out his tongue to show his father the melting rainbow in his mouth.
By the time Peter had devoured his ice cream, sprinkles, and cone and all, he wanted to know what Da Force was.
Jack hesitated. “Well, when two people love each other very much, they decide to spend their lives together, and they get married.”
It was mostly true—Jack remembered loving Hannah. In high school she had kept printed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in her locker and kept her mousy brown hair cropped close to her head. Regardless, she was elected May Queen in the spring of her senior year, and her slender, boyish hips and hollow cheeks photographed well. She spoke about gender equality in her speeches, and Jack found her naïve feminism endearing and strangely erotic. Jack did not share the same fiery activism as his wife; he was simple, but sincere, and the unattainable feminist found him charming. Hannah didn’t believe in marriage, but the two fell sloppily in love when they both turned twenty-one, and married the year after.
“But then, sometimes, two people grow up and grow apart,” continued Jack, struggling with the concept and the wording.
While Hannah had completed a master’s degree in Social Work and went on to rescue little girls from abusive parents, Jack stayed home and raised Peter. Although the East Side of Cleveland kept Hannah busy with humanitarian work, the deteriorating city was not big enough to accommodate yet another enthusiastic but mediocre musician. Jack had dreamed of being a drummer, and although he thrived in the classroom and in the quiet, secure studio, he lingered on the periphery of the self-destructive lifestyle of his more liberal peers at Oberlin. He brought them water backstage when his classmates’ bands toured northern Ohio, and picked up broken drumsticks, and repaired frayed cables. When his friends skipped class to arrange chaos in parallel lines, snorting white through Washington and dousing their artistic fervor with wine, Jack would lend them his carefully scribed lecture notes. Having smothered his own musical passion in college, Jack gave up and instead trained to be a fireman, extinguishing other people’s fires.
“Then two people who were once happy together begin to fight a lot, and sometimes they just can’t work it out. And at this point they decide it might be best to separate,” explained Jack.
Separate. Like corn from mashed potatoes. Or lips, and fingers, and legs. And boys and girls bathrooms.
“And although they used to care very much about each other, they let their love go, and it just . . . drifts away.”
Peter wasn’t sure what love looked like, but if it were anything like helium, it would float away like an unattended balloon and make your voice squeak when you suck it in. But everything comes back eventually—dogs that run away, boomerangs, mosquito bites, letters to the North Pole, and even lost balloons. Da Force didn’t seem so bad.
That night, Hannah came home late from taking care of other people’s troubled children, and while they waited for her, Jack and Peter sat on the floor of the living room listening to old vinyl records and drumming on the carpet. Despite his own abandoned attempts at musical eminence, Jack still harbored a secret desire that his son, although not terribly bright at schoolwork, could be instructed in classic rock. While Peter pounded the floor with unintentional syncopation and wailed like Robert Plant, Jack glossed the greats—The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix—referring to them by their surnames only like old friends, the kind you’d call up and invite for dinner. Peter liked Ringo’s beats the best since they were easy to follow, and he always requested that his father put on The Beatles first. They made it through the 1960s and had moved into the early 70s before Hannah arrived home. Hendrix was unexpectedly suffocated by her furrowed brows, and the house fell silent and still.
At the dinner table, Peter sat between Hannah and Jack, and watched the tennis match of growing resentment between his parents. He observed in subsequence his mother’s slicked back bun and his father’s wavy layers, her gin and his cognac, her tightly drawn lips and his scornfully squinted eyes, her calculated bites and his hungry mouthfuls. Hannah had made Peter’s favorite meal: barbequed pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and fresh strawberries on the side. But the beans were runny tonight, too hastily made, oozing across his plate until the strawberries were puddled in sauce, and seeping into the corner of the sesame seed bun. Peter tried to build a wall out of his knife and spoon to keep them separate.
Like boys and girls. Mothers and fathers.
When Peter pushed away his plate having barely touched the baked beans, Hannah grew suspicious.
“Not hungry, Petey?” asked his mother, thinly veiling sharp agitation with the soft professional tone she used with her clients.
“Daddy let me get a chocolate dipped waffle cone AND sprinkles at the park today after school! And a red balloon but it floated away. . .” Peter stuck out his tongue again, hoping the rainbow was still there to show his mother. She told him to close his mouth, and turned violently to Jack.
“Ice cream, eh? Are you trying to bribe him? Get him on your side?”
“Me? Strawberries aren’t even in season, Hannah. And you don’t eat pork!”
Peter had been enjoying Da Force until his mother abruptly ordered him away from the table to take a bath and go to bed. When he protested, Jack fee fi fo fumed him, telling him that the giant at the top of the beanstalk would smell him out and turn him into a soup unless he was squeaky clean. Peter sulked upstairs.
When Jack still hadn’t come into Peter’s bedroom to read him a story two hours later, Peter decided it must have been the bubble castle he left popping in the bathtub. His mother especially hated when he did that; she would stoop to her knees on the tile and attack the tub with yellow-gloved hands and mumble angry interjections about rings and porcelain under her breath.
Peter lay on top of his blankets, watching the spider that had been slowly making its way across his ceiling navigate the canyon between two tiles. He waited for his purple raisin skin to unwrinkle and waited for his father to appear at his door, with the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales they had been devouring one by one for months despite Hannah’s disapproval. Secretly, the stories frightened Peter, although he liked the cadence of his father’s voice and the whisper of a page turning. Tonight, Jack had promised his son the tale of the Pied Piper, but he never came. Da Force had lured Peter with promises and ice cream and walks in the park, but led him to naught but lukewarm bathwater and bedtimes without stories.
From downstairs, Peter could hear the gruff sound of his father’s reading voice—the one he reserved for the villains’ lines or bits about monsters—although it was faster now, louder, more syncopated, echoing up the stairs and bounding into Peter’s open bedroom door. Hannah’s harsh tongue chased Jack’s fiendish words with a whip and a tongue-lashing. She rebuked Jack’s retaliation with the same sharp, reproachful tone she used when Peter pinched her in the car or when he asked her embarrassing questions about body parts in public.
“You’re a fucking selfish feminist poser!” snarled Jack.
Barbequed pulled pork sounds squelched against the wall.
“And you’re a child playing fireman!” accused Hannah.
Something crashed.
The sound of Hannah’s heels on the kitchen floor was riveting. It moved from left to right beneath Peter’s head, cyclically, backwards and forwards like Zeppelin records on his father’s turnstile.
Peter was dozing off to the escalating sound of the grim drama downstairs, but he was afraid to fall asleep. Usually, his mother would come in and flatten his tousled hair, wavy like his father’s, kiss him good night, and wish him sweet dreams before switching off the light. Lying awake in the buzzing fluorescent glow of his overhead light, Jack was afraid the sweet dreams wouldn’t come.
Since it seemed as though his mother wouldn’t be coming up to tuck him into bed, Peter resolved to call for his dreams himself. He would be a big boy, taking charge. Peter made a clearing in the Star Wars action figures that were arranged on his dresser, and clambered up the knobs on the drawers and sat among them, a pajama-clad Gulliver amongst miniature ewoks and storm troopers. He leaned out the open window, stretching his head far into the darkness, leaving his decapitated body stretched out precariously on the sill. Satellites and airplanes and constellations above were confused for wandering balloons, scouring the neighborhood roofs below, searching for little boys waiting for dreams. Cicadas hummed in the trees, their songs shrill with helium. Peter waited for the yellow ribbon tail of his red balloon to stretch across the night sky, but this time he would leap out and snag it, although his father had failed to do so earlier. Peter wasn’t afraid of heights like the quivering yellow ribbon seemed to be. He just wasn’t sure if he had enough love in him to be able to float.
Friday, April 23, 2010
The Stranger
When I met Sheila for the first time she was wearing a crimson stocking cap, a silly looking thing that must have been knit by my mother-in-law. It had red balled tassels that hung down at her forehead like a head wound, obscuring her eyes. She refused to take it off. When Tamara tried, Sheila wailed as though wounded, waving her tiny fists in the air in the most obstinate show of anger that a five-month-old infant could possibly muster. My wife had told me in letters that Sheila had quite the temper, although she certainly didn’t inherit it from me. She would hold her breath until her little plump body turned purple, and then tighten her muscles in a sort of defiant rigor mortis. Sheila was throwing a fit at the airport the day I met her, and when I reached out to kiss her pale forehead, pushing aside the tassels of the hat, she was lying stiff as a board in her mother’s arms.
Tamara and I had been married for two years before I left for Iraq. At the time we were childless but still happy, and when the fat letter came with the inescapable date and time of my departure, we rationalized that it was as good a time as ever for me to go. We knew this would happen. She was the kind of strong military wife who sent DVDs and pop culture magazines to soldier-husbands overseas, to remind them what swimming pools and neon lights looked like while they were surrounded by an invariable sea of sandy grey. She could handle distance, and blood, and fear. When I finally returned, she threw a huge party—my in-laws and my father and my brother and their wives all came over, with hamburgers and smiles for grilling and Happy Family photographs. She kept the crepe paper and banner up for days after the party, and framed the picture of my father shaking my hand at the airport and placed it on the mantle, as if to remind me that I was home, and in case I forgot that he was proud.
My father, although never in the military himself, had been in the police academy with my commander, and had the same fierce pride of a military man. Lt. Col. Chessani and my father were both strong men with wide shoulders that passed time talking about artillery and hypothetical military strategy. When I was young, my father made it an annual tradition to take my two brothers and me to the Dayton Air Force Museum. We would speed North across the Ohio River in his cop car, and to give my brothers and me a thrill, my father would sometimes turn on his lights and zoom through intersections illegally. We made it to Dayton every year in record time. On the way home, giddy with testosterone and babbling in a militaristic lexicography, we would stop at the Wolf Creek Gun Club, and pretend to be marines, shooting down imaginary adversaries that popped wearily back up after every round of fire. Although I was the youngest of three boys, I always had the fastest and most accurate shot of us all. I imagined myself as a sharpshooter, and I think my father did too. He beamed when I brought home enlistment papers for the Marines after my senior year of high school.
When I left for Iraq, Tamara didn’t know that she was nearly two months pregnant. She told me the news shortly after, and I wasn’t there to hug her gently and kiss her forehead, like I wished I could have done. I was in a small tent where sand whipped between my cheek and the phone and got between my teeth when my jaw dropped at the word. I wanted to shout, and grin, and cry, and stamp my feet and dance, but Chessani was counting minutes and observing me, so I simply nodded slowly as if she could see me, and whispered that I would be home soon.
She decided to move back in with her parents when she found out that she was pregnant. The house we shared felt too small for her expanding belly. Every day she sat at her parents’ old kitchen table, counting days and counting stretch marks, and writing letters to tell me about the size of her stomach and the daily news. She watched television at dinner and read newspapers in the bathtub, and wrote me things about my own division—the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines—that even I didn’t know. Tamara’s letters read like an adventure novel, and she made crawling through dirt on my elbows and standing guard under the incessant sun sound heroic. But I didn’t want to read about my own life—I wanted to hear about her insatiable cravings for watermelon (the evidence of which was dribbled on the stationary) or listen to her complain about sewing elastic into her jeans. I saw round, barren hills explode before my eyes in Iraq, but I never felt my baby kick.
Tamara started to worry about me soon after I returned home from my deployment. She was afraid I wasn’t bonding with Sheila like I should, and that our only daughter would grow up with a stranger for a father. At night sometimes I would creep into Sheila’s nursery, and watch the flannel ducklings on her pajamas rise and fall with the steady rhythm of her breathing. The moonlight was spilling onto Sheila’s crib, casting her figure in a white, phosphoric glow. In the strange light her skin peeled away from her small frame and lay in disjointed shadows, sloughing off her fingers like gloves. When I went to pick up her segmented body I was surprised how pale she was. My brazen hand, callous and hardy from wind and metal rifles scorching in the sun enveloped her ashen cheek. We were not of the same flesh, she and I.
She woke at my touch and her wide black eyes stared past my own with no hint of recognition. She drew her thin lips into a ghastly frown, turning down the corners of her pleasantly plump cheeks. A cobweb of spittle stretched between her gums when she tilted her head back, filling her lungs with oxygen before the inevitable scream. Tamara came running when she heard shrieks, punctuating the silence like bullet holes, and took Sheila from my arms. She knelt by the crib making shooshing noises, and I crept outside to the porch.
After a few weeks, the colorful crepe paper and the banner came down. My father’s eyes in the photograph mocked me from the mantle as I sat in front of the television in the afternoon. Tamara stopped listening to the news at home. Her eyes begged to know what we, the 3/1, had done, if the reports were really true. Had soldiers from my unit really forced citizens from their blazing homes in the Jolan District, then butchered them with calculated precision on their doorsteps? No, Tamara, we did not. I was there, I saw it all.
While storming into Fallujah I fancied myself a hero, finally a true member of the “Thundering Third,” and when the Arab rushed at me from the door to his home, gun in hand, I aimed and shot with the same deadly precision as I had at old Wolf Creek. I was surrounded by my brothers as they rushed past, muttering curses and crying prayers through dirty masks.
The amount of blood surprised me. The Arab wobbled and fell back, like my limbless rubber enemies of old, but he didn’t stand back up. A red doppa grew from the crown of his head, oozing into a keffiyeh on the doorstep where he lay. Young children dragging toddlers by the forearm and women carrying infants were spewing from the entrance of the house, rushing over the Arab, over his expanding bloody cap, over his still, swollen chest. A little girl with bare feet tripped on his outstretched, empty hands, and knelt over his purple face shrieking “Abi!” until her mother came and swept the child out of her father’s blood. Fiery tongues flicking from the doorway to the house lapped at the puddle collecting on the doorstep.
The leaves on trees don’t change color in Fallujah, they just wave to the shamal in the summer and bow to the heavy rains in the winter. In early November, the palm trees were shaking off the dust of the dry season’s prevailing winds and preparing themselves for the torrential downpour of the next five months. In 2004, we set fire to the trees. Their tips glowed in sanguine reds, and sulfuric yellows, and burnt oranges. We brought them autumn, and we brought them freedom. That’s what Chessani told us.
Once home, I took to spending my evenings on the doorstep, picking out familiar sights in the landscape—the cracked concrete slabs in my neighbor’s driveway, the scattered glass of a broken beer bottle in the gutter, the fat, grooved tires of the cars lining the street. Barren tree limbs groped at smoky winter clouds and somewhere a siren wailed. I was comforted by the drone of an airplane above, and by the whimpering of a chained dog in a kennel nearby. Inside, a child wept.
Tamara and I had been married for two years before I left for Iraq. At the time we were childless but still happy, and when the fat letter came with the inescapable date and time of my departure, we rationalized that it was as good a time as ever for me to go. We knew this would happen. She was the kind of strong military wife who sent DVDs and pop culture magazines to soldier-husbands overseas, to remind them what swimming pools and neon lights looked like while they were surrounded by an invariable sea of sandy grey. She could handle distance, and blood, and fear. When I finally returned, she threw a huge party—my in-laws and my father and my brother and their wives all came over, with hamburgers and smiles for grilling and Happy Family photographs. She kept the crepe paper and banner up for days after the party, and framed the picture of my father shaking my hand at the airport and placed it on the mantle, as if to remind me that I was home, and in case I forgot that he was proud.
My father, although never in the military himself, had been in the police academy with my commander, and had the same fierce pride of a military man. Lt. Col. Chessani and my father were both strong men with wide shoulders that passed time talking about artillery and hypothetical military strategy. When I was young, my father made it an annual tradition to take my two brothers and me to the Dayton Air Force Museum. We would speed North across the Ohio River in his cop car, and to give my brothers and me a thrill, my father would sometimes turn on his lights and zoom through intersections illegally. We made it to Dayton every year in record time. On the way home, giddy with testosterone and babbling in a militaristic lexicography, we would stop at the Wolf Creek Gun Club, and pretend to be marines, shooting down imaginary adversaries that popped wearily back up after every round of fire. Although I was the youngest of three boys, I always had the fastest and most accurate shot of us all. I imagined myself as a sharpshooter, and I think my father did too. He beamed when I brought home enlistment papers for the Marines after my senior year of high school.
When I left for Iraq, Tamara didn’t know that she was nearly two months pregnant. She told me the news shortly after, and I wasn’t there to hug her gently and kiss her forehead, like I wished I could have done. I was in a small tent where sand whipped between my cheek and the phone and got between my teeth when my jaw dropped at the word. I wanted to shout, and grin, and cry, and stamp my feet and dance, but Chessani was counting minutes and observing me, so I simply nodded slowly as if she could see me, and whispered that I would be home soon.
She decided to move back in with her parents when she found out that she was pregnant. The house we shared felt too small for her expanding belly. Every day she sat at her parents’ old kitchen table, counting days and counting stretch marks, and writing letters to tell me about the size of her stomach and the daily news. She watched television at dinner and read newspapers in the bathtub, and wrote me things about my own division—the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines—that even I didn’t know. Tamara’s letters read like an adventure novel, and she made crawling through dirt on my elbows and standing guard under the incessant sun sound heroic. But I didn’t want to read about my own life—I wanted to hear about her insatiable cravings for watermelon (the evidence of which was dribbled on the stationary) or listen to her complain about sewing elastic into her jeans. I saw round, barren hills explode before my eyes in Iraq, but I never felt my baby kick.
Tamara started to worry about me soon after I returned home from my deployment. She was afraid I wasn’t bonding with Sheila like I should, and that our only daughter would grow up with a stranger for a father. At night sometimes I would creep into Sheila’s nursery, and watch the flannel ducklings on her pajamas rise and fall with the steady rhythm of her breathing. The moonlight was spilling onto Sheila’s crib, casting her figure in a white, phosphoric glow. In the strange light her skin peeled away from her small frame and lay in disjointed shadows, sloughing off her fingers like gloves. When I went to pick up her segmented body I was surprised how pale she was. My brazen hand, callous and hardy from wind and metal rifles scorching in the sun enveloped her ashen cheek. We were not of the same flesh, she and I.
She woke at my touch and her wide black eyes stared past my own with no hint of recognition. She drew her thin lips into a ghastly frown, turning down the corners of her pleasantly plump cheeks. A cobweb of spittle stretched between her gums when she tilted her head back, filling her lungs with oxygen before the inevitable scream. Tamara came running when she heard shrieks, punctuating the silence like bullet holes, and took Sheila from my arms. She knelt by the crib making shooshing noises, and I crept outside to the porch.
After a few weeks, the colorful crepe paper and the banner came down. My father’s eyes in the photograph mocked me from the mantle as I sat in front of the television in the afternoon. Tamara stopped listening to the news at home. Her eyes begged to know what we, the 3/1, had done, if the reports were really true. Had soldiers from my unit really forced citizens from their blazing homes in the Jolan District, then butchered them with calculated precision on their doorsteps? No, Tamara, we did not. I was there, I saw it all.
While storming into Fallujah I fancied myself a hero, finally a true member of the “Thundering Third,” and when the Arab rushed at me from the door to his home, gun in hand, I aimed and shot with the same deadly precision as I had at old Wolf Creek. I was surrounded by my brothers as they rushed past, muttering curses and crying prayers through dirty masks.
The amount of blood surprised me. The Arab wobbled and fell back, like my limbless rubber enemies of old, but he didn’t stand back up. A red doppa grew from the crown of his head, oozing into a keffiyeh on the doorstep where he lay. Young children dragging toddlers by the forearm and women carrying infants were spewing from the entrance of the house, rushing over the Arab, over his expanding bloody cap, over his still, swollen chest. A little girl with bare feet tripped on his outstretched, empty hands, and knelt over his purple face shrieking “Abi!” until her mother came and swept the child out of her father’s blood. Fiery tongues flicking from the doorway to the house lapped at the puddle collecting on the doorstep.
The leaves on trees don’t change color in Fallujah, they just wave to the shamal in the summer and bow to the heavy rains in the winter. In early November, the palm trees were shaking off the dust of the dry season’s prevailing winds and preparing themselves for the torrential downpour of the next five months. In 2004, we set fire to the trees. Their tips glowed in sanguine reds, and sulfuric yellows, and burnt oranges. We brought them autumn, and we brought them freedom. That’s what Chessani told us.
Once home, I took to spending my evenings on the doorstep, picking out familiar sights in the landscape—the cracked concrete slabs in my neighbor’s driveway, the scattered glass of a broken beer bottle in the gutter, the fat, grooved tires of the cars lining the street. Barren tree limbs groped at smoky winter clouds and somewhere a siren wailed. I was comforted by the drone of an airplane above, and by the whimpering of a chained dog in a kennel nearby. Inside, a child wept.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Ennui
I don’t want anyone to know that the real reason that I’m sitting alone at my cluttered desk at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon, contemplating suicide, is because I am bored. Boredom, although I’m sure it has killed lots of people, is simply not an acceptable motive for suicide. Unfortunately, pistol loaded and pen in hand, I cannot think of anything more exciting to write.
My wastebasket is littered with crumpled pieces of stationary that I borrowed from work on Monday. The letterhead is mocking me, and even in my most inspired moments of desolate prose, my suicide note reads like a pre-pubescent attempt at melodrama. My boredom leaks through my pen and onto the shallow lines.
If it can be judged from my utter failure to compose a suitable farewell to my family and friends, my life will be posthumously remembered as tedious. I have always been a diligent student, and a loyal employee, and a faithful husband, but after roughly 36 years of existence, I’ve come to the conclusion that diligence, loyalty, and faithfulness hardly amount to success.
My inexhaustible dedication to academia during my undergraduate studies merited me a grant for graduate work in New York City’s supposedly flourishing magazine industry. I had earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at a respectable yet relatively unheard of college in rural Ohio, and my Director of Studies himself shook my hand and patted my back in a paternalistic way, congratulating me on my “superior placement.” Dr. Briggs will never know that the internship and later the full time position that I soon landed with Ornithology Monthly had nothing to do with my magazine publishing prowess nor my particular interest in birds. Taking note of my impeccable grades in university level Latin, my boss had simply hired me as a copy editor as a solution to certain loyal readers’ irate responses to the repeated misspellings of scientific names.
But even my unquestioning devotion to my bat-brained boss at the magazine could not grant me job security, nor could it save me from the inevitable embarrassment of having to list “Ornithology Monthly, copy editor, 1996-1999” under “Work Experience” on my resume. When the magazine went out of business three years after I started working there, I conceded to take a temporary position as a mail carrier in a nearby New Jersey suburb at the suggestion of my then fiancée, Amy. The former postmaster of said town had perished suddenly when the mail truck slid off the road on an icy day in a desperate attempt to faithfully deliver the daily mail to summit of the town’s single hill. The town council, comprised mostly of the city across the harbor’s failed politicians and seasoned veterans of local affairs, voted overwhelmingly to return to the quaint tradition of delivering mail on foot in order to preserve the lives of its mail carriers. The ordinance has not been overruled since I accepted the job eleven years ago, and each day, I walk with my mailbag to the top of the very same hill that killed my unfortunate predecessor.
It would be unjust to blame the hill itself for my current state of affairs, although as I again toss crumpled US Post Office stationary into the corner, I can’t think of anything better to write. I want to detail the absurd tedium of dragging a full mailbag to the summit of this goddamn city on a hill, only to see my efforts tumble to the valley below each evening, where the next day’s gossip and news and letters collect in piles, waiting for my delivery.
This morning I did not go to work for the first time in six years. The last time I missed unannounced was in 2004 when I had to rush Amy to emergency room, as she was suffering the miscarriage of our daughter that was never born. We have not tried to have children since. I cannot blame missing work on a son having the flu, or a daughter’s field trip to the Metropolitan art museum, or a niece’s theatrical production of Little Women. This morning, I just wanted to sit at home and eat buttery popcorn for breakfast (Amy hates when I do that—she swears I always leave oily fingerprints on the freshly cleaned counter) and watch Paul Newman dig holes and then refill them in Cool Hand Luke.
Before leaving early this morning for work, Amy, in her infinite kindness, cut out today’s Charlie Brown cartoon and left it by my orange juice, like she does every morning. She says that she sees a bit of my faithfulness and dedication in the personage of Charlie, and always reminds me “Hey, you got your little red-headed girl,” and then blushes, her cheeks matching her rosy hair. Today, Lucy again dupes Charlie Brown, and for the umpteenth time, he flings ungracefully into the air and lands heavily on his back with an exasperated sigh. It pains me to know that I must have left buttery fingerprints on the thin paper when I replaced yesterday’s strip in its privileged place on our refrigerator. I’m sure Amy will find them and lament my choice of a last meal.
I’m sorry for eating popcorn for breakfast, I begin to write, then pause, scratch my temple with the barrel of the pistol that I have been playing with in my left hand, and decide it might be best to finish this ordeal without leaving a note. I collect the crumpled stationary that missed the wastebasket, then take out the trash, and return to my desk chair.
The phone rings.
It must be Mr. Walton, at the Post Office, calling to reprimand me for my absence.
“Hello?”
Amy is on the other line, asking if I’m sick. Too timid to call my home phone and confront the possibility that I simply stayed home from work without an excuse, Mr. Walton had instead called my wife’s cell phone, figuring that something must be wrong. I assure her otherwise, and when she hangs up she tells me that she loves me.
I am now ready. My desk is tidy. But as I clasp the pistol, a horrific thought paralyses my trigger finger. In my mind is a pathetic image of Amy with her little stainless steel box of cleaning tools, scrubbing away at the office carpet with a toothbrush to get the congealed blood from the beige fibers. I decide to move to the bathroom, which Amy had specifically lined with easy-to-clean tile, hoping that one day a daughter would spill nail polish on the floor or drip hair dye in the sink.
I sit on the toilet with the lid down, but am uneasy with my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. I do not look like a man about to commit suicide. My cheeks are slightly flushed and my tawny hair has retained its characteristic sideways puff from being exposed to eleven years of windy walks. I notice for the first time that the skin under my eyes has become slightly leathery and brazen from staring endlessly into the sun as I ascend the hill day after day.
I remember the argument that Amy and I had when we first decided to move to New Jersey. It had been her idea. She hates subways and pigeons and taxis and the smell of steam emitting from manholes in the sidewalk, and for her, a move across the harbor was perfectly logical. What she loves most about New York City is its skyline in the sunset, blazing in golden hues as the sun dips beneath the horizon. From our small but Western facing front lawn, she can stand and watch nature perfecting the art of alchemy each evening.
At the time I disagreed. I was instead looking down at the harbor, and the roof of the post office in the valley, and the winding roads that snake up the side of the hill, knowing that I would have to walk up them, but never imagining that I would do so daily for eleven years of my relatively short life. It was a frigid New Jersey February evening when Amy and I climbed to the summit of the hill for the first time. She pointed with a slender finger to the distant skyline on the glowing horizon, but I was too busy looking at the freezing ice creeping across the harbor like stretch marks on a pale liquid belly. I suppose I haven’t looked up since.
From the living room the clock reminds me of the advancing hour. Amy will be returning soon and it is too late to do anything now. I will have to go out and buy a fresh newspaper, and erase the evidence of my morning’s misdemeanor. Tomorrow I will return to work, and I will drag my mailbag like a boulder that I have been condemned to push daily to the summit of my hill before it tumbles endlessly back to its base. I’m not sure what forever feels like, but at least in this tedious mortality I am daily the champion of my hopeless hill, and standing at its apex, New York City stretches out below my feet.
My wastebasket is littered with crumpled pieces of stationary that I borrowed from work on Monday. The letterhead is mocking me, and even in my most inspired moments of desolate prose, my suicide note reads like a pre-pubescent attempt at melodrama. My boredom leaks through my pen and onto the shallow lines.
If it can be judged from my utter failure to compose a suitable farewell to my family and friends, my life will be posthumously remembered as tedious. I have always been a diligent student, and a loyal employee, and a faithful husband, but after roughly 36 years of existence, I’ve come to the conclusion that diligence, loyalty, and faithfulness hardly amount to success.
My inexhaustible dedication to academia during my undergraduate studies merited me a grant for graduate work in New York City’s supposedly flourishing magazine industry. I had earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at a respectable yet relatively unheard of college in rural Ohio, and my Director of Studies himself shook my hand and patted my back in a paternalistic way, congratulating me on my “superior placement.” Dr. Briggs will never know that the internship and later the full time position that I soon landed with Ornithology Monthly had nothing to do with my magazine publishing prowess nor my particular interest in birds. Taking note of my impeccable grades in university level Latin, my boss had simply hired me as a copy editor as a solution to certain loyal readers’ irate responses to the repeated misspellings of scientific names.
But even my unquestioning devotion to my bat-brained boss at the magazine could not grant me job security, nor could it save me from the inevitable embarrassment of having to list “Ornithology Monthly, copy editor, 1996-1999” under “Work Experience” on my resume. When the magazine went out of business three years after I started working there, I conceded to take a temporary position as a mail carrier in a nearby New Jersey suburb at the suggestion of my then fiancée, Amy. The former postmaster of said town had perished suddenly when the mail truck slid off the road on an icy day in a desperate attempt to faithfully deliver the daily mail to summit of the town’s single hill. The town council, comprised mostly of the city across the harbor’s failed politicians and seasoned veterans of local affairs, voted overwhelmingly to return to the quaint tradition of delivering mail on foot in order to preserve the lives of its mail carriers. The ordinance has not been overruled since I accepted the job eleven years ago, and each day, I walk with my mailbag to the top of the very same hill that killed my unfortunate predecessor.
It would be unjust to blame the hill itself for my current state of affairs, although as I again toss crumpled US Post Office stationary into the corner, I can’t think of anything better to write. I want to detail the absurd tedium of dragging a full mailbag to the summit of this goddamn city on a hill, only to see my efforts tumble to the valley below each evening, where the next day’s gossip and news and letters collect in piles, waiting for my delivery.
This morning I did not go to work for the first time in six years. The last time I missed unannounced was in 2004 when I had to rush Amy to emergency room, as she was suffering the miscarriage of our daughter that was never born. We have not tried to have children since. I cannot blame missing work on a son having the flu, or a daughter’s field trip to the Metropolitan art museum, or a niece’s theatrical production of Little Women. This morning, I just wanted to sit at home and eat buttery popcorn for breakfast (Amy hates when I do that—she swears I always leave oily fingerprints on the freshly cleaned counter) and watch Paul Newman dig holes and then refill them in Cool Hand Luke.
Before leaving early this morning for work, Amy, in her infinite kindness, cut out today’s Charlie Brown cartoon and left it by my orange juice, like she does every morning. She says that she sees a bit of my faithfulness and dedication in the personage of Charlie, and always reminds me “Hey, you got your little red-headed girl,” and then blushes, her cheeks matching her rosy hair. Today, Lucy again dupes Charlie Brown, and for the umpteenth time, he flings ungracefully into the air and lands heavily on his back with an exasperated sigh. It pains me to know that I must have left buttery fingerprints on the thin paper when I replaced yesterday’s strip in its privileged place on our refrigerator. I’m sure Amy will find them and lament my choice of a last meal.
I’m sorry for eating popcorn for breakfast, I begin to write, then pause, scratch my temple with the barrel of the pistol that I have been playing with in my left hand, and decide it might be best to finish this ordeal without leaving a note. I collect the crumpled stationary that missed the wastebasket, then take out the trash, and return to my desk chair.
The phone rings.
It must be Mr. Walton, at the Post Office, calling to reprimand me for my absence.
“Hello?”
Amy is on the other line, asking if I’m sick. Too timid to call my home phone and confront the possibility that I simply stayed home from work without an excuse, Mr. Walton had instead called my wife’s cell phone, figuring that something must be wrong. I assure her otherwise, and when she hangs up she tells me that she loves me.
I am now ready. My desk is tidy. But as I clasp the pistol, a horrific thought paralyses my trigger finger. In my mind is a pathetic image of Amy with her little stainless steel box of cleaning tools, scrubbing away at the office carpet with a toothbrush to get the congealed blood from the beige fibers. I decide to move to the bathroom, which Amy had specifically lined with easy-to-clean tile, hoping that one day a daughter would spill nail polish on the floor or drip hair dye in the sink.
I sit on the toilet with the lid down, but am uneasy with my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. I do not look like a man about to commit suicide. My cheeks are slightly flushed and my tawny hair has retained its characteristic sideways puff from being exposed to eleven years of windy walks. I notice for the first time that the skin under my eyes has become slightly leathery and brazen from staring endlessly into the sun as I ascend the hill day after day.
I remember the argument that Amy and I had when we first decided to move to New Jersey. It had been her idea. She hates subways and pigeons and taxis and the smell of steam emitting from manholes in the sidewalk, and for her, a move across the harbor was perfectly logical. What she loves most about New York City is its skyline in the sunset, blazing in golden hues as the sun dips beneath the horizon. From our small but Western facing front lawn, she can stand and watch nature perfecting the art of alchemy each evening.
At the time I disagreed. I was instead looking down at the harbor, and the roof of the post office in the valley, and the winding roads that snake up the side of the hill, knowing that I would have to walk up them, but never imagining that I would do so daily for eleven years of my relatively short life. It was a frigid New Jersey February evening when Amy and I climbed to the summit of the hill for the first time. She pointed with a slender finger to the distant skyline on the glowing horizon, but I was too busy looking at the freezing ice creeping across the harbor like stretch marks on a pale liquid belly. I suppose I haven’t looked up since.
From the living room the clock reminds me of the advancing hour. Amy will be returning soon and it is too late to do anything now. I will have to go out and buy a fresh newspaper, and erase the evidence of my morning’s misdemeanor. Tomorrow I will return to work, and I will drag my mailbag like a boulder that I have been condemned to push daily to the summit of my hill before it tumbles endlessly back to its base. I’m not sure what forever feels like, but at least in this tedious mortality I am daily the champion of my hopeless hill, and standing at its apex, New York City stretches out below my feet.
Familial
Papp dropped her off at the diner at a quarter to four. Despite his best paternalistic intentions, begging her to instead come home with him, she swore that her sister would pick her up from the diner on the way to her Big City Office Job. But Eva didn’t have a sister, or a mother for that matter, and she preferred to forget her father. Besides, now she had a new one—a tubby middle aged white man who wore neither his age nor his fat well. His jowls kept time in jiggles as the van pulled into the diner’s parking lot, empty but for three scattered cars, waiting eerily in the neon glow of the restaurant’s sign like abashed solicitors outside a peep show.
The Big City lights did not reach this far out into the hills, and the fluorescent diner burned brightly, attracting road side night dwellers as insects are drawn to street lamps in the dark. Papp became suddenly aware of the advantages of the darkness as the headlights switched off and he smiled, his neck fat stretching taunt across his chin, making his wide grin look shallow and his lips thin. She looked away from his bared sallow teeth, feeling devoured by his gaze. Her stomach was grumbling but Papp was drunk and she knew that even if she turned away and ignored him she would soon feel his grubby fingers on her skin, reaching through the sticky space between them and finding their way to her hipbone. An unreciprocated yet delighted giggle bubbled deep from his stomach, followed by a ghost of that evening’s brandy, dead and fermented yet haunting his chest cavity. She waited for the worn cotton of a five beneath the elastic on her underwear, then sprung into the neon night, leaving Papp alone in the dark to his own devices.
“Daddy loves his Baby Girl!” cried Papp from the window of the van with a brandy-scented hiccup.
Leaving Papp, Eva tried to dismiss the incestuous hunger she saw in his jaundiced eyes, bulging as though strangled about the neck. But behind every incest lies a kingdom waiting to be inherited, robed in red but built on the prophecies of gods. When she felt most violated, most polluted, she fancied herself mythological. If Oedipus had been a girl, Eva mused, her mother would have perished of utter shame, wagging her mournful head the whole way to the grave, and her father would have fucked her with disturbing desperation each night in the wide backseat of a van. To the unimpressive soundtrack of squeaking springs and skin sticking to fake leather upholstery, Whiteness overcame Blackness, and Lightness consumed Darkness. Eva longed for the day that Papp, upon the sickening realization that he had railed his Daughter, would hang himself with a stiff rope, fulfilling at long last the tragic, Oedipal prophecy. Granted, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes, disgusted and ashamed at what he had done, but at least this would save Eva from the sight of her shambled life and the bruises on her thighs. Faint hints of predawn light teased the black horizon with blotchy, yellow fingers, and Eva scuttled across parking lot wishing for blindness.
Eva’s mother had, in fact, died prematurely, although not from shame of her obstinate daughter. Her eventual demise was hardly anything to merit mythological retellings. She simply withered away from overwork, worn away year after year by the demands of far too many hungry boys, so that by the end of her slighted days she was a frail and osteoporotic skeleton, threatening to break beneath the increasingly heavy demands of her men. Eva’s father was ashamed of his wife’s emaciated form.
“Don’t you ever go hungry, you hear me Baby Girl?” he preached endlessly, thrusting the rough wood of a hoe into her hands, forcing his daughter to work even before she could properly walk. “Hunger is the worst of all earthly ills,” he believed, “because if you’re hungry, it means you’re lazy. And God won’t save the idle.” And so Eva worked, but tonight her stomach growled nonetheless.
From the darkness of the diner’s doorstep, Eva could see Màna strutting in the fluorescent light with her tray in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. Her smile evoked an innocent pride, as though she were a maître d’hôtel in a lavish restaurant, and as though the mounded plates of sweet potato fries she was balancing on her elbow were no less than tiramisu. Eva was glad to see her. The rotund Greek woman had a ringing laughter that was disproportionately delicate compared to her thick body. She looked toward the diner’s door at the sound of the dinging bell with the same eager expectancy of a mother awaiting the late return of her wayward daughter.
Màna rarely asked questions of Eva, she just brought her a plate of grits with melted cheese, and asked if she’d like some coffee. Eva nodded, not looking her in the eyes. On weekdays when Eva had slow nights, Màna wouldn’t make her pay. When the girl insisted, the Greek matron would protest, and if nothing else, slip a handful of after dinner mints into her pocket or an apple in a brown paper bag for Eva on the way out the jingling door. Màna joked, “You’re too thin, Baby Girl,” placing her hand on Eva’s cheek, dwarfing her chin and cheekbones alike with a single olive palm. Though touched, Eva would slink away, as though shame were a contagious and fatal disease that could be spread upon the slightest contact. Eva was afraid that if she allowed Màna to pity her, she would infect her with indignity.
The evening had been for the most part slow; before Papp had come to pick her up, she had but a sole client. He was a sturdy man that reminded Eva of her brothers, with dirt beneath his fingernails and grease smeared under his chin, as though he had worked his way out from under the body of a car and slid right under her own black underside. He paid well, and Papp had been drunkenly gracious and generous. Tonight she would pay back Màna in full. Màna would be proud of her Baby Girl, strong and self-sufficient. Eva drank her coffee in silence, listening to the faint click of insects zooming to their death in the fluorescent lights above.
The door chimed with the entrance of a new customer, and both Màna and Eva looked up with anticipation. Sometimes she dreamed that one day a real-life sister would walk through the door on the way to her Big City Office Job, with soft, slender hands, a modest, grey pencil skirt, and perhaps even a fashionable bob haircut. But Eva did not have a sister. Instead, she saw the visage of her brothers, the same slicked back hair and skin blackened under grime. Eva quickly averted her eyes, looking into the neon night, avoiding yet again the wide grin of a drunken man, the taste of his yellow teeth familiar to her tongue. A pair of grease stained mechanic’s overalls sauntered past, and Eva could not bring herself to lift her fork to her mouth. Màna had disappeared with a pot of coffee, attending to her men. Eva left without paying, hungry.
The Big City lights did not reach this far out into the hills, and the fluorescent diner burned brightly, attracting road side night dwellers as insects are drawn to street lamps in the dark. Papp became suddenly aware of the advantages of the darkness as the headlights switched off and he smiled, his neck fat stretching taunt across his chin, making his wide grin look shallow and his lips thin. She looked away from his bared sallow teeth, feeling devoured by his gaze. Her stomach was grumbling but Papp was drunk and she knew that even if she turned away and ignored him she would soon feel his grubby fingers on her skin, reaching through the sticky space between them and finding their way to her hipbone. An unreciprocated yet delighted giggle bubbled deep from his stomach, followed by a ghost of that evening’s brandy, dead and fermented yet haunting his chest cavity. She waited for the worn cotton of a five beneath the elastic on her underwear, then sprung into the neon night, leaving Papp alone in the dark to his own devices.
“Daddy loves his Baby Girl!” cried Papp from the window of the van with a brandy-scented hiccup.
Leaving Papp, Eva tried to dismiss the incestuous hunger she saw in his jaundiced eyes, bulging as though strangled about the neck. But behind every incest lies a kingdom waiting to be inherited, robed in red but built on the prophecies of gods. When she felt most violated, most polluted, she fancied herself mythological. If Oedipus had been a girl, Eva mused, her mother would have perished of utter shame, wagging her mournful head the whole way to the grave, and her father would have fucked her with disturbing desperation each night in the wide backseat of a van. To the unimpressive soundtrack of squeaking springs and skin sticking to fake leather upholstery, Whiteness overcame Blackness, and Lightness consumed Darkness. Eva longed for the day that Papp, upon the sickening realization that he had railed his Daughter, would hang himself with a stiff rope, fulfilling at long last the tragic, Oedipal prophecy. Granted, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes, disgusted and ashamed at what he had done, but at least this would save Eva from the sight of her shambled life and the bruises on her thighs. Faint hints of predawn light teased the black horizon with blotchy, yellow fingers, and Eva scuttled across parking lot wishing for blindness.
Eva’s mother had, in fact, died prematurely, although not from shame of her obstinate daughter. Her eventual demise was hardly anything to merit mythological retellings. She simply withered away from overwork, worn away year after year by the demands of far too many hungry boys, so that by the end of her slighted days she was a frail and osteoporotic skeleton, threatening to break beneath the increasingly heavy demands of her men. Eva’s father was ashamed of his wife’s emaciated form.
“Don’t you ever go hungry, you hear me Baby Girl?” he preached endlessly, thrusting the rough wood of a hoe into her hands, forcing his daughter to work even before she could properly walk. “Hunger is the worst of all earthly ills,” he believed, “because if you’re hungry, it means you’re lazy. And God won’t save the idle.” And so Eva worked, but tonight her stomach growled nonetheless.
From the darkness of the diner’s doorstep, Eva could see Màna strutting in the fluorescent light with her tray in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. Her smile evoked an innocent pride, as though she were a maître d’hôtel in a lavish restaurant, and as though the mounded plates of sweet potato fries she was balancing on her elbow were no less than tiramisu. Eva was glad to see her. The rotund Greek woman had a ringing laughter that was disproportionately delicate compared to her thick body. She looked toward the diner’s door at the sound of the dinging bell with the same eager expectancy of a mother awaiting the late return of her wayward daughter.
Màna rarely asked questions of Eva, she just brought her a plate of grits with melted cheese, and asked if she’d like some coffee. Eva nodded, not looking her in the eyes. On weekdays when Eva had slow nights, Màna wouldn’t make her pay. When the girl insisted, the Greek matron would protest, and if nothing else, slip a handful of after dinner mints into her pocket or an apple in a brown paper bag for Eva on the way out the jingling door. Màna joked, “You’re too thin, Baby Girl,” placing her hand on Eva’s cheek, dwarfing her chin and cheekbones alike with a single olive palm. Though touched, Eva would slink away, as though shame were a contagious and fatal disease that could be spread upon the slightest contact. Eva was afraid that if she allowed Màna to pity her, she would infect her with indignity.
The evening had been for the most part slow; before Papp had come to pick her up, she had but a sole client. He was a sturdy man that reminded Eva of her brothers, with dirt beneath his fingernails and grease smeared under his chin, as though he had worked his way out from under the body of a car and slid right under her own black underside. He paid well, and Papp had been drunkenly gracious and generous. Tonight she would pay back Màna in full. Màna would be proud of her Baby Girl, strong and self-sufficient. Eva drank her coffee in silence, listening to the faint click of insects zooming to their death in the fluorescent lights above.
The door chimed with the entrance of a new customer, and both Màna and Eva looked up with anticipation. Sometimes she dreamed that one day a real-life sister would walk through the door on the way to her Big City Office Job, with soft, slender hands, a modest, grey pencil skirt, and perhaps even a fashionable bob haircut. But Eva did not have a sister. Instead, she saw the visage of her brothers, the same slicked back hair and skin blackened under grime. Eva quickly averted her eyes, looking into the neon night, avoiding yet again the wide grin of a drunken man, the taste of his yellow teeth familiar to her tongue. A pair of grease stained mechanic’s overalls sauntered past, and Eva could not bring herself to lift her fork to her mouth. Màna had disappeared with a pot of coffee, attending to her men. Eva left without paying, hungry.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
